4 Mar
2014
4 Mar
'14
9:24 a.m.
On Mon, 3 Mar 2014, Steven Hirsch wrote:
On Tue, 4 Mar 2014, Terry Stewart wrote:
Whew... Finally nailed it by working backwards on the decision tree from
the goal: A working diskette.
My choices for writing it were (in increasing order of pain):
- Physical device mapped into xtrs80 under Linux.
- Imagedisk on my duplicating machine
- Physical device mapped into Keil emulator under MSDOS
- Catweasel on a second shop machine.
Under xtrs80, I tried booting a CopyCat JV3 image and using it to copy a
JV3 image of SU4 to a physical diskette. No luck. It would start the
target drive and hang on Track 0.
Next up: ImageDisk. IMD has a utility that will convert a DMK image to
IMD for write to media. I had only a JV3 (DSK) image. Tried using one of
Tim Mann's tools to convert JV3 --> DMK. It failed with an error message
about the track being too long. Went back to the web and found a DMK of
an older version of SU. Tried running DMK2IMD on that, but it failed with
a message that the PC diskette controller was not capable of writing mixed
sector sizes on the same track.
On that basis, I skipped the Keil emulator since it would be trying to use
a PC diskette controller - and would require disassembly of the system to
get the 5.25" drive on the primary controller (normally attached to the
Compaticard IV secondary which isn't recognized by Keil).
Down to the Catweasel.
(Tez was kind enough to send me an SU.DMK, but it was unfortunately for a
DS diskette and my Mod 4 is not so equipped.)
Tim Mann's CW suite has 'dmk2cw', but SU4 was a JV3 (as mentioned) and
couldn't be converted with his tools. Finally the light went on. I
created a blank DMK disk image for xtrs, mounted it as drive 2, mounted
the SU4 JV3 image as drive 1 and booted CopyCat on drive 0. Told it to
make copy of 1 --> 2. Yay! It worked! An SU4.DMK file. Fired up the CW
box, crossed my fingers and ran 'dmk2cw'. Tick, tick, tick... Bingo.
All tracks written.
Cross fingers, carry diskette into the shop where the Mod 4 was sitting,
reset same. It came up to the SU4 opening menu and seems to work fine.
Hopefully this will be of help to anyone else stuck in the same situation.
What a saga....
What really confuses me is that Tez mentions being able to do this on the
Kiel emulator running on an older 486 PC. So the question is: Was DMK2IMD
wrong in stating that it wasn't possible?
Steve
--
It's been a while and I can't remember
the details of each individual
program but I THINK I just used the Keil emulator and Copycat.4.1 as
mentioned on the website. Once copycat was loaded it asked for a source and
destination disk. Using SU4 image as the source disk it just copied it out
to a floppy.
It will take me a while to put the hardware together for that. My diskette
RW system uses a Compaticard IV, which appears as a secondary controller. I
doubt the Keil emulator will be able to talk to it, so I need to get in the
box and rearrange cables.
In the interim, I tried CopyCat on xtrs (Linux). It reads the SU4 image
without a problem, but hangs trying to write to the floppy.
Next up, I took a DMK image of SuperUtility (older version) and tried to
convert it to IMD format. DMK2IMD refuses, telling me that the PC diskette
controller is incapable of mixing sector sizes on the same track.
I can probably write it using my Catweasel, but that's also an adventure to
setup. Probably have to wait for the weekend. In the meantime, do you know
where I can find a dmk image of SU4? Tim Mann's jv2dmk utility refuses to
convert it, telling me the track is too long.
This looks to be quite a pitched battle! The way su4 was mentioned in the
docs for the FreHD, I had the impression this was a very common tool - not so
much it seems.