4 May
2017
4 May
'17
3:24 p.m.
On Fri, 5 May 2017, Terry Stewart via cctalk wrote:
I don't know anything. but, I will point out a few things to look into.
They may be
CP/M, or some other format entirely.
It turns out these disks are from a VAX
machine. Assuming the OS is VMS, I
scoured the Internet for something that might read them. Eventually I found Hunter Goatley's v 1.3 of Paul
Nankervis's ODS2 at
http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv.com?ODS2 . This program
"Sector 1 read failed 87
PHYIO Error 500 Block 1 Length 512 (ASPI: 0 0 0)
Mount failed with 500"
Chuck G., does anyone know...
1. What that error means?
so far, only that it failed on what was probably the
first sector that it
tried. "87" is probably not meningful to anybody except VMS
"PHYIO" MIGHT mean physical I/O
"500" also isn't applicable to other systems.
2. If it would make a difference that I'm
running the Win32 exe in Windows 98, rather than NT, 2000, XP etc.?
It is more likely to be successful in 98 ("real mode")
3. I'm not sure ODS2 was built with 8 inch disks
in mind?
No idea. But, other than NEC PC98, machines generally do NOT use the same
format specs on 8:, 5.25, 3.5
Would it make a difference?
absolutely.
If there are more than one format available, then the read program might
1) ASSUME one of the lot
2) have options to choose
3) attempt to detect what it sees.
Besides ODS-2, what about ODS-1 and ODS-5?
Find somebody who knows VMS, and find out what the options were.
CP/M disks in the 8 inch drive can be accessed and
read/written to under
MS-DOS by the machine I have the drive hooked up to, so I don't think
it's a hardware issue.
Does your system handle single density? (some FDCs do;
some don't)
4. How likely is it that disks from a 1985 VAX is in
some weird
proprietary format OTHER than VMS?
quite possible. For example, they might have, at some point in the past,
used a program under VMS to copy their data to some other format that they
thought might be handy, such as SSSD CP/M!
Using IMD, or other tools, can you determine the density, bytes per
sector, and sectors per track of the disks (try at least 2)
Also, is the data recorded single sided, or both sides?
If you can read it with IMD, then you can start wading through content
within sectors to get more clues about what's there.