9 Sep
2020
9 Sep
'20
10:19 a.m.
On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 18:56, Jules Richardson via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 9/8/20 6:04 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> Date and time of Command.com and any other DOS files will identify the
> version number.
Only after DOS 5 or so, I fear.
I've got 11/26/85 on command.com.
Yup. `ATTRIB *.*` might work in 3.3 though.
DIR /A or
DIR /A:H
will let you see the hidden files (presumably IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS; PC-DOS
had IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM instead)
The /a switch isn't part of the dir command in whatever 3.3 version I have. However, I just wrote a DOS 6.22 boot disk and that
shows three hidden
files on the hard disk:
MSDOS.SYS (11/18/85)
MIO.SYS (11/18/85)
SD.INI
I'm guessing that the 'M' in MIO.SYS is "Mitsubishi" and the OS is
tailored
in some way to the machine.
Uhoh. Danger, Will Robinson.
TYPEing "sd.ini" indicates that it's related to Norton Speed Disk - not a
program I'm familiar with, but as that appears to be a defragmenter, it
might hint at why my drive isn't bootable and seems to be having problems
with various executables - I wonder if the directory structure "looks
sane", but file contents have been completely mangled.
Oh dear, yes. If the machine is not totally vanilla but close enough
to boot vanilla DOS, then it's possible that SPEEDISK could have run
but incorrectly and mangled stuff. Similarly running DOS defraggers on
a VFAT disk with LFNs would mangle them, in the Win95 era.
TBH, though, I'm surprised -- later versions of DOS (such as 6.22)
didn't run on DOS compatible machines, because they'd died out by
then. It was IBM compatible or nothing by the DOS 6 era, IIRC. So I'd
expect a later-era machine to be compatible enough that Norton etc.
would have no problem.
I ran things like PKARC and PKZIP successfully on DOS-compatibles in
the late '80s, because they only did legal file access and wrote plain
text to the screen. I wouldn't expect SPEEDISK to run on an early
Apricot or something.
--
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