[Coco] Drive Wier 3: WARNING!

[N8WQ]

I will let you guys know how my USB to Serial adapter works as soon as I 
get my DW3 ROM and cable. Thanks to Boisy, I chose one with the FTDI 
chipset.

Alan Jones
 
-- 
N8WQ - Canal Winchester, Ohio
http://exwn8jef.googlepages.com/home



Boisy Pitre wrote:
> Tim, 
>
> Thanks for taking the time to make your post and sharing your findings.
>
> I want to echo what Tim is saying: there are some USB<->Serial 
> adapters that will mostly work, but not flawlessly with DriveWire 3.  
> There have even been cases where real PC serial ports failed to work 
> reliably.
>
> There's no hard and fast rule as to what will work or what won't but 
> apparently some ports are more tolerant than others.
>
> Regards,
> Boisy G. Pitre
> -- 
> Tee-Boy
> Mobile: 337.781.3570
> Email: boisy at tee-boy.com
> Web: http://www.tee-boy.com
>
> On Mar 24, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Tim Fadden wrote:
>
>> Ok, now that I have your attention! :-)
>>
>> I purchased an hdb-dos rom chip and serial cable from Cloud-9.  Ha 
>> yoo, it worked perfectly as advertised.
>>
>> My main reason for wanting it was in order to back up my coco os9 
>> hard drive system, and to make real floppies from images.
>>
>> The initial boot to os9 from DW3 worked flawlessly.
>>
>> I then created a new boot floppy from the drive wire image.  When 
>> booting the system from the floppy, it would immediately crash upon 
>> accessing any of the /x# drive wire virtual disks.
>>
>> Boisy Pitre and Robert Gault had this bug found and fixed in two or 
>> three days! yahoo  Now I can boot from a floppy, and access the three 
>> floppy drives, my hard drives, and the DW3 drives.
>>
>> I set off to do a backup.  Looked like it was working until in the 
>> morning when I checked the result.  Oh Oh! dsave got out of sync 
>> Whats this?
>>
>> Making a long story short, I was getting read/write errors on the DW3 
>> disks.  This was verry spiratic. only 3 to 5 random errors in 71 MB 
>> of transfer.
>>
>> After several days of testing, and eliminating possibilities I found 
>> the problem!
>>
>> The USB to Serial adapter was loosing data!  The 20+ year old 
>> hardware was working perfectly, DW3 was working perfectly!
>>
>> After going to a true RS-232 port on the pc, I have been able to do 3 
>> complete backups with 0 errors.
>>
>> That is a total of about 210 mega bytes, and over 21 hours of data 
>> transfer!  I have tested transfers from HD to DW3, and visa versa.
>>
>> *******************************
>> Bottom line is; if your using a usb-serial adapter and want to make 
>> 100% sure you getting clean data do a lot of testing!
>>
>> I don't know if it was the usb-serial module, or the drivers for it.  
>> It may be the individual module, or the chip set on it (prolific).  
>> As for me, I am sticking to a true RS-232 port.
>>
>> Any how its a hoot that the newest piece of technology was the one 
>> causing the problem!
>>
>> Thanks to all that helped me sort it out.
>>
>> Tim Fadden
>>
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>
>
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