[Coco] dskini and retrieve

[Robert Gault]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> I'm having a mess of a time trying to get both retrieve.exe and 
> dskini.exe to work on my old Win98 PC.
> 
> I've got two versions of those utilities, apparently one by Collyer and 
> the originals from Vavasour.  I've set my BIOS to every setting 
> possible: 360K 5.25", 720K 3.5", 1.44, and 2.88.  The drive is the 
> original 3.5" 1.44 that came with the PC.  I've tried both DD and HD 
> floppies, with the write protect and density holes opened and closed.  I 
> couldn't remember if the write protect hole should be opened or closed 
> so I tried both.
> 
> Nothing seems to work.  All attempts cause DOS to throw the 
> "Abort/Retry/Ignore/Continue" prompt at me except for one BIOS setting 
> which causes dskini.exe to quickly step through all tracks of the floppy 
> in about one second similar to if the head is seeking track 0 from the 
> last track.  ZipppPpppPPPpp, then the DOS prompt as if the action was 
> successful.  It was not.  The floppy remains blank afterwards.
> 
> Is there any kind of MS-DOS or Windows 98 tool out there works better 
> than these Vavasour tools?
> 

I've never had any problems with these programs with a standard 3.5" 
drive. The write-protect hole should be closed to permit writing.

Any problems with these programs will either be BIOS related or memory 
related. I've never had any problems using the default BIOS settings. I 
normally have a config.sys file as follows:
device=c:\windows\himem.sys /testmem:OFF
dos=high,umb
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe ram