2 Dec
2019
2 Dec
'19
5:11 p.m.
On 12/2/19 4:55 PM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote:
The menu you get when you hit Escape on startup has an option
for setting a floppy as 8". Mine is ROM 5.7 which I believe
is the next to last. Unless it is different than the other
CP/M systems I have FORMAT should have no hardware dependent
code in it. It was the OS that tracked and controlled what
the underlying format of the floppies were.
The GIDE seems to work. It appears to be FDISK that is broken.
Given that, unless people had custom versions of FDISK I fail
to see how anyone set up a hard disk on a P112.
Well, I have
the dBit FDADAP. Works great. I have used them before
on a PC to access PDP-11 disks from PUTR and E11. The P112 claims to
support 8" but I am finding it unlikely. If it (well, at least the
OSes it runs) don't even know it only has 77 tracks I can't see how
anyone has done 8" disks on it.
I went spelunking in the ROM and BIOS sources the other day, and I don't
see any 8" drive stuff in there at all -- it's all 3.5" and 5.25". I
looked at FORMAT too. Am I looking at old code? Why am I getting this sneaking suspicion that
none of this stuff
actually works?
I haven't had mine out in a while, but last I did, the GIDE did work.
Seems like there was some ordering of operations on HD setup that I did
wrong the first time.
It doesn't help that there are no docs for the thing other than whatever
paper came with it.
Thus the reason for me searching places like this for help. :-)
Sanity check your software versions? Mixing and matching variants can
be problematic since there are several generations and several forks of
the P112 and GIDE stuff; and there's at least one version of FORMAT
that's reputed to have a serious bug.
No mix or match. Just using the images provided on the CD that
came with it. FORMAT works OK for 3.5" disks. I have had no
luck trying to FORMAT 5.25" or 8" floppies. And I can't even
get that far on a hard disk.
bill