23 Nov
2005
23 Nov
'05
2:18 p.m.
OS-9 Al wrote:
Great :) I've since found that the floppy drive in the system was hosed, but
the boot floppy's still good, so I've now managed to boot from floppy only,
which is a start.
Unfortunately accesses to the hard disk are currently failing; my assumption
is that the board used to store hard disk geometry in NVRAM and the NVRAM
battery's likely long since given up. At this moment I have no idea how to
reprogram it as that was almost certainly done with a utility outside of the
OS-9 boot floppy that I have... (remember that this system uses an ST506 disk
via a bridge board, so it's non-intelligent and needs its drive geometry
stored somewhere)
Still, it is at the stage of being an operational OS-9 system now - I just
don't know what's lurking on that hard disk. Hopefully it was all non-exciting
user data...
Ah, thanks - that's worth bearing in mind if it turns out that I have no way
of getting the machine's hard drive working with the system itself; it'd be
nice to see what's on there at least.
cheers!
Jules
I've just come across my first OS9 system
Power off at will! On the plus
side, the interface between host and disk unit is SASI, so
there's
a chance I can do a raw backup of the drive via a modern system. On
the minus
side, the physical drive is an ST506 type via an OMTI bridge board, so
I can't
easily go from raw backup to working system without proper low-level
format
utils (which I don't have, although I'm still sorting through floppies
that
came in the same haul)
You can do a web search and find disk utilities for PC and maybe Linux
(and maybe Mac) that will read/write to an OS-9 disk image.