24 May
2000
24 May
'00
7:45 p.m.
In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver floppies I've been
copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.
--Chuck
24 May
24 May
7:48 p.m.
I know what you mean. I've made the shift from DOS 6.20 to 6.22 a couple of
itmes. What, by the way, is DOS 6.3?
If your motherboad is modern enough, it should support bootable CD's, but I
don't know what the appropriate spec for a bootable CD would be. I do
recall that ISO9660 or whatever it was is NOT the right format. IIRC, it
had a name that sounded like it belonged on the Taco Bell menu. I got out
of the fray when I quit beta-testing Adaptec's software, which I did with
the release of their first "easy-cd-creator" vesrion. This thin claimed to
do things it didn't because it couldn't, but the managers said it would . .
. <sigh> . . .
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 6:45 PM
Subject: Bootable Floppy from CD?
In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver
floppies I've been
copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.
--Chuck
8:21 p.m.
Rumor has it that Richard Erlacher may have mentioned these words:
I know what you mean. I've made the shift from DOS
6.20 to 6.22 a couple of
itmes. What, by the way, is DOS 6.3?
IBM marketed a PC-DOS 6.3 with Stacker and some other stuff, IIRC.
Personally, for the boot stuff, I'd just stick to a boot floppy... boot the
computer from your PC-DOS disk 1, and if it goes into a setup routine, hit
<F3> (well, for MS-DOS... not sure if it's different with IBM's stuff) and
when you get to the dos prompt, if you have two floppies, put a floppy in
your B: and do a:
format b: /s (to put the system on.)
If you don't have 2 floppies, issue that command anyway. With a 1 floppy
system, you have a *virtual* B: and the system will automatically ask you
for source and destination disks when it wants you to swap them.
HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
8:56 p.m.
I've never encountered that version 6.3. I've got a few sets of install
disketted for DOS 6.21, which was made up for DELL, specifically without the
compression support in it or among its utilities. I, havning spent much
time testing the more popular compression schemes, am an avid user of
compression. I've found it to be no more problem-prone than plain-vanilla
DOS, yet the maintenance tools (scandisk) seem to work better on compressed
volumes than on uncompressed. Compression does seem to enhance disk
subsystem preformance. If you have a solid backup regimen, you should never
have to worry about data loss just because you use compression. I found
that DRVSPACE yielded about a 15% performance increase and had no added risk
of system failure. I also found that the risk of data loss was actually
lower (based on my substantial but still relatively small data sample) than
that with uncompressed data, probably due to the more effective error
management tools.
the long and short is that I like it, use it, and haven't yet come to cuss
it. That's why I've not used the DOS 6.21.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: Bootable Floppy from CD?
the
Rumor has it that Richard Erlacher may have mentioned
these words:
>I know what you mean. I've made the shift from DOS 6.20 to 6.22 a couple
of
itmes. What,
by the way, is DOS 6.3?
IBM marketed a PC-DOS 6.3 with Stacker and some other stuff, IIRC.
Personally, for the boot stuff, I'd just stick to a boot floppy... boot computer from your PC-DOS disk 1, and if it goes into
a setup routine, hit
<F3> (well, for MS-DOS... not sure if it's different with IBM's stuff) and
when you get to the dos prompt, if you have two floppies, put a floppy in
your B: and do a:
format b: /s (to put the system on.)
If you don't have 2 floppies, issue that command anyway. With a 1 floppy
system, you have a *virtual* B: and the system will automatically ask you
for source and destination disks when it wants you to swap them.
HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
8:47 p.m.
On Wed, 24 May 2000, Richard Erlacher wrote:
If your motherboad is modern enough, it should support bootable CD's, but I
don't know what the appropriate spec for a bootable CD would be. I do
recall that ISO9660 or whatever it was is NOT the right format. IIRC, it
had a name that sounded like it belonged on the Taco Bell menu. I got out
"High Sierra"???
8:59 p.m.
Is that the one they settled on? When I left the beta group they were
kicking around a number of names like "Torito" and a few others that got me
to thinking about Tacoritos, etc. I'll certainly admit that High Sierra
doesn't sound so much like a Taco Bell item. It's been a few years since I
last visited a Taco Bell, though, there might be something that sounds like
that.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) <transit(a)lerctr.org>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 7:47 PM
Subject: Re: Bootable Floppy from CD?
On Wed, 24 May 2000, Richard Erlacher wrote:
>
> If your motherboad is modern enough, it should support bootable CD's,
but
I
> don't know what the appropriate spec for a
bootable CD would be. I do
> recall that ISO9660 or whatever it was is NOT the right format. IIRC,
it
> had a name that sounded like it belonged on the
Taco Bell menu. I got
out
"High Sierra"???
11:21 p.m.
At 08:47 PM 5/24/00 -0500, you wrote:
On Wed, 24 May 2000, Richard Erlacher wrote:
El Torito.
The origin? beats me.
If your motherboad is modern enough, it should
support bootable CD's, but I
don't know what the appropriate spec for a bootable CD would be. I do
recall that ISO9660 or whatever it was is NOT the right format. IIRC, it
had a name that sounded like it belonged on the Taco Bell menu. I got out
"High Sierra"??? 
25 May
25 May
1:55 p.m.
On Thu, 25 May 2000, Carlos Murillo wrote:
El Torito.
The origin? beats me.
There's a restaurant chain in California called that.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking for a six in a pile of nines...
Coming soon: VCF 4.0!
VCF East: Planning in Progress
See http://www.vintage.org for details!
24 May
24 May
7:56 p.m.
Chuck McManis <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com> wrote:
In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver
floppies I've been
copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.
What I use on Linux to back up images of 1440K floppies is:
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img bs=18k
And to recreate them from an image:
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k
(The 18k isn't strictly necessary, but for efficiency I like to use a
reasonably large block size that happens to evenly divide into the size
of the disk.)
If the format is something other than 1440K, more specific floppy
device names are sometimes required. With suitable arguments, I've
successfully done this with 160K, 180K, and 360K 5.25 inch diskettes and
720K 3.5 inch as well.
I keep disk images of DOS and various useful utility programs in
a super-secret hidden directory on my web server, so that I can get
them if I need them when I'm not at home.
There's a DOS program called "rawrite" that can recreate floppies
from images, if you need to do it when you don't
have Linux or xBSD
handy.
25 May
25 May
10:02 a.m.
At 05:45 PM 5/24/00 -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver
floppies I've been
copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.
People seem to have confused your request. I did not think you
wanted a bootable CD. :-)
The 'dd' approach has a few failings. One, it's not tolerant of
bad sectors, right? Two, I think you'd need to be sure that your
box's settings could handle all the old variations of disk capacity
from the old days. Three, raw disk images aren't
easily searchable
and indexable in the same way as 'tar' or 'zip',
but of course those
formats wouldn't handle the boot sectors. After all, you'd want to
find things after you archived them.
I talk about a few of these issues on my page at
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/diskutil/.
- John
6:57 p.m.
John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
The 'dd' approach has a few failings. One,
it's not tolerant of
bad sectors, right?
No, but then not much PC software is. I normally only worry about
making disk images of good disks; I don't have any use for preserving
bad ones. Assuming that it made sense to save an image of a partially
bad diskette, how would you represent bad sectors?
Two, I think you'd need to be sure that your
box's settings could handle all the old variations of disk capacity
from the old days.
As I mentioned, Linux *has* /dev/fd0xx variations for all of the common
PC disk formats. If you want to save an image of something bizarre,
it's definitely the case that you'll have to do something fancier, but
I don't recall anyone asking for that.
Three, raw disk images aren't easily searchable
and indexable in the same way as 'tar' or 'zip', but of course those
formats wouldn't handle the boot sectors.
For dos diskettes, it's just about as easy as tar or zip when either
using mtools, or mounting the image file using the loopback device.
26 May
26 May
8:20 a.m.
At 11:57 PM 5/25/00 +0000, Eric Smith wrote:
John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
As my web page mentions, Sydex's Anadisk defined a file format that
wrapped the sectors, allowing you to mark one as bad. I wish there
was a popular and universal way of archiving floppy disk images
this way. Our hobby really needs it. The emulation scene must've
solved parts of this problem already.
If you have a disk with bad sectors and you try the 'dd' approach,
it just fails. Where's the fallback? I realize I'm picking nits
here. I'm sure 'dd' or rawread/rawrite would serve Chuck's purposes
for now, putting a significant dent in his pile of floppies, leaving
perhaps only one or two with unarchivable read errors.
I have a bunch of 8 inch disks from my Terak, RT-11, CP/M, etc.
machines with bad sectors. When I tried to archive my C-64 disks
I found plenty with bad areas. I gave up.
This might be a good time for one of the disk experts to tell
us about common failure modes for various disk drive and media
technology.
The 'dd' approach has a few failings.
One, it's not tolerant of
bad sectors, right?
No, but then not much PC software is. I normally only worry about
making disk images of good disks; I don't have any use for preserving
bad ones. Assuming that it made sense to save an image of a partially
bad diskette, how would you represent bad sectors? For dos diskettes, it's just about as easy as tar
or zip when either
using mtools, or mounting the image file using the loopback device.
Yes, but a search through all your disk images would be a lot of
mounting and un-mounting. You'd need to write scripts or tools in
either case to aid a search.
As I mentioned, Linux *has* /dev/fd0xx variations for
all of the common
PC disk formats.
Chuck said "unix" not 'Linux'. :-)
- John
9:17 a.m.
On Fri, 26 May 2000, John Foust wrote:
As my web page mentions, Sydex's Anadisk defined a
file format that
wrapped the sectors, allowing you to mark one as bad. I wish there
was a popular and universal way of archiving floppy disk images
this way. Our hobby really needs it. The emulation scene must've
solved parts of this problem already.
Why doesn't the collective CC define this standard then? Who better to
define standards for archiving old computer software than a group of
people devoted to it?
Unless someone finds an already well-documented standard (in which case we
should review it, make any modifications necessary to fix it, and then
adopt that as THE standard) then we should create a standards body to
address these things. If we take it one step further we can then start
defining standards for other types of things having to do with vintage
computers. A storage medium archiving standard is definitely a good one
to start with.
I am serious about this.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking for a six in a pile of nines...
Coming soon: VCF 4.0!
VCF East: Planning in Progress
See http://www.vintage.org for details!
11:39 a.m.
At 07:17 AM 5/26/00 -0700, Vintage Computer GAWD! wrote:
On Fri, 26 May 2000, John Foust wrote:
I'm sure there are several candidates out there.
http://www.sydex.com/other.html once had info about Anadisk but
now it's gone. My hard drive had:
10/22/97 02:14p 122,783 Anadisk-2_07.zip
09/03/92 12:50p 78,502 ANADISK.DOC
09/03/92 12:50p 163,747 ANADISK.EXE
Below is the section from the manual that describes their
file format.
- John
The Dump operation writes a specified area of a diskette to a DOS
file. After selecting the Dump option from the Main Menu, the
diskette drive containing the diskette to be read, the range of
cylinders and sides to be written to a specified DOS file are
selected.
Each sector written to the file is optionally preceded by an
8-byte header record of the following form:
+------+------+------+------+------+------+----------+
| ACYL | ASID | LCYL | LSID | LSEC | LLEN | COUNT |
+------+------+------+------+------+------+----------+
ACYL Actual cylinder, 1 byte
ASID Actual side, 1 byte
LCYL Logical cylinder; cylinder as read, 1 byte
LSID Logical side; or side as read, 1 byte
LSEC Sector number as read, 1 byte
LLEN Length code as read, 1 byte
COUNT Byte count of data to follow, 2 bytes. If zero,
no data is contained in this sector.
All sectors occurring on a side will be grouped together;
however, they will appear in the same order as they occurred on
the diskette. Therefore, if an 8 sector-per-track diskette were
scanned which had a physical interleave of 2:1, the sectors might
appear in the order 1,5,2,6,3,7,4,8 in the DOS dump file.
After the last specified cylinder has been written to the DOS
file, AnaDisk returns to the Main Menu.
As my web page mentions, Sydex's Anadisk
defined a file format that
wrapped the sectors, allowing you to mark one as bad. I wish there
Why doesn't the collective CC define this standard then? Who better to
define standards for archiving old computer software than a group of
people devoted to it?
8:44 p.m.
New subject: Defining Disk Image Dump Standard
On Fri, 26 May 2000, John Foust wrote:
Below is the section from the manual that describes
their
file format.
<...>
Each sector written to the file is optionally preceded by an
8-byte header record of the following form:
+------+------+------+------+------+------+----------+
| ACYL | ASID | LCYL | LSID | LSEC | LLEN | COUNT |
+------+------+------+------+------+------+----------+
ACYL Actual cylinder, 1 byte
ASID Actual side, 1 byte
LCYL Logical cylinder; cylinder as read, 1 byte
LSID Logical side; or side as read, 1 byte
LSEC Sector number as read, 1 byte
LLEN Length code as read, 1 byte
COUNT Byte count of data to follow, 2 bytes. If zero,
no data is contained in this sector.
All sectors occurring on a side will be grouped together;
however, they will appear in the same order as they occurred on
the diskette. Therefore, if an 8 sector-per-track diskette were
scanned which had a physical interleave of 2:1, the sectors might
appear in the order 1,5,2,6,3,7,4,8 in the DOS dump file.
After the last specified cylinder has been written to the DOS
file, AnaDisk returns to the Main Menu.
This is a good start. The header should include a byte that contains a
flag indicating the status of the sector (good, bad, etc).
What about odd formats? I take my experience from the Apple ][. You had
stuff like half-tracks and quarter-tracks (the head was stepped half-way
or half of half-way between tracks to store data), odd disk formats
(custom sector sizes, custom sector layouts, etc.), synchronization
between tracks (one copy protection scheme was to write a two tracks so
that if a seek was done from one track to the other, a specific sector
would be expected under the head as soon as it got to the next track).
Many of these methods were also used on the C64, and I believe on the
Atari 8-bits.
Software has been written on the Apple ][ to read the raw track data and
dump it into a file that could then be compressed and sent over a modem
line. Copy protected disks could only be archived in this manner, or else
they would need to be cracked.
I have a ton of original software for the Apple ][, and a ton of cracked
software. I'd like to archive both, as the cracked copies often included
the "credits" that the cracker placed on the software for having cracked
it, and this is part of the culture (in fact it's a fairly interesting
part of the culture that I'd like to document some day).
The AnaDisk software doesn't seem to accomodate copy protected or
custom-format disks. The standard will have to address these disks as
well.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking for a six in a pile of nines...
Coming soon: VCF 4.0!
VCF East: Planning in Progress
See http://www.vintage.org for details!
27 May
27 May
2:07 p.m.
New subject: Defining Disk Image Dump Standard
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26 May
26 May
2:56 p.m.
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25 May
25 May
10:43 a.m.
In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver
floppies I've been
copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.
Using dd or the equivalent is probably the best way. I generally zip
the floppy contents (with appropriate flags to preserve hidden and system
files and the volume label) and create a dd image if the disk is bootable.
Eric
1:15 p.m.
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27 May
27 May
5:04 a.m.
On 24 May 2000, at 17:45, Chuck McManis wrote:
In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver
floppies I've been
copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.
--Chuck
My favorite program for saving floppy disk images is WinImage
(www.winimage.com). As the name implies, it's a Windows program and its
purpose is to make (and allow you to modify) images of IBM-compatible
disks. One very handy feature is the ability to convert images to
different disk formats, such as 1.2 MB to 1.44 MB (yes, that includes
bootable disks). You can create a self-extracting image file for
distribution to people who don't have WinImage. You can even create image
files from hard drives, or .ISO image files from CD-ROMs. Files can be
extracted from images without having to re-create the floppy disk. The
program can even save the directory listing as text or html. Some features
are only available in the "Pro" version, but I don't remember the details
because that's the version I have.
If only it could modify .ISO images the way it can modify floppy disk
images...
-----------------------------------------------------
Mike Newman INTERNET: mike(a)delos.rain.com
Aloha, Oregon USA -or- mike.w.newman(a)gte.net
http://home1.gte.net/res003ki/index.htm
-----------------------------------------------------
Laws of Project Management #4: When things are going well, something
will go wrong. When things just can't get any worse, they will. When
things appear to be going better you have overlooked something.
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19 comments
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participants (11)
-
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
cem14＠cornell.edu -
cmcmanis＠mcmanis.com -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
foo＠siconic.com -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
korpela＠albert.ssl.berkeley.edu -
mike＠delos.rain.com -
richard＠idcomm.com -
transit＠lerctr.org -
zmerch＠30below.com