11 Feb
2009
11 Feb
'09
6:58 a.m.
--- On Wed, 2/11/09, Larry Yates <laptoplarry at gmail.com> wrote:
My original plan is/was to retrieve my Compaq Portable
(my
wife buried it in
a closet) to create a boot disk...only to find that I could
not
locate the MS-DOS boot disk for the Compaq?!?!
So, I have no 5.25 360K drive available to create a
boot
disk for either the
Compaq or the Kaypro :-(
I'm now wondering if I can find a SCSI 5.25 low density
drive to attach to
the portable hard drive of the MAC to create a boot disk
for the Compaq.
You'll drive yourself crazy trying to locate a SCSI 5 1/4" floppy drive. No such
device exists. There were some special external SCSI boxes with 5 1/4" and 3
1/2" disk drives in them, but the drives weren't SCSI - there was a controller to
convert them. And they didn't work like regular devices, they needed special drivers.
From the Compaq's DOS I'd be able to
create the
boot disk for the Kaypro
using the usual tools. I guess the ideal thing would be to find a drive and
controller for my
"modern" machine.
You shouldn't need a special controller or special drive, if you have a PC/clone
around. You CAN write 360k disks with a 1.2mb drive. You just need to use DD media. Bulk
erased disks work best, or you can format the disk as 80 track DD (720k) first, then
reformat to 40 track. This helps to remove any extra data that might remain, if the disk
was originally written in a 360k drive. Not always necessary either. The disk should boot
on a 360k drive, but it won't be reliable if you intend to write to it in the 360k
drive. So, what you do is make the boot disk on DD media in the 1.2mb drive, boot the
target computer, then format a fresh DD disk in the target computer, and copy the boot
disk you made onto the fresh disk.
Or, better yet, just hook a 360k drive up to the PC. They shouldn't be that hard to
find - and you can always borrow one out of another computer (like the Compaq). Or, just
pop the top off the Compaq, unhook the drive, and hook it up to your PC with a long floppy
cable.
-Ian