A friend of mine has a pile (55) 8" floppies which were created on a Motorola EXORciser MDOS system. Does anyone know if the data on these disks can be recovered on a CPM system or similar, or will he need to find an EXORciser?

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 14:54, Fred Cisin wrote: CP/M, since it's so close to the iron anyways, is probably a good way to do a sector dump of the disk. Copy it to a modern machine and post-process the data. Getting the sector data off is the task. If it's hard-sectored, you're probably screwed. (Turn the diskette inside it's sleeve; there should only be one (a pair?) of index holes. If you see 12 or so holes it's hard-sectored. Not many 8" diskettes were hard sectored.) There were two flavors of floppy controller chip in the 70's and 80's, th Western Digital chips and the NEC 765. I always preferred the WD chips (1791? 1793? I forget!) They were the best for diskette hacking. They would read any damn old FM or MFM signal, and you could dump to memory and do the bit extraction in software. Very cool. The NEC765, though nominally easier to do certain things, was a lot less flexible and far more fussy about format. (I used to run my 86DOS 0.86/MSDOS1.25/MSDOS2.00 system on DSDD 8" floppies with 9 1K sectors per track. I thought I was very cool for doing this (cringe)). The short of it is, if you have a CP/M system with a WD controller, you can write nice dumb code to do a 'track dump' if you have enough memory or a sector dump if you don't and see what's electrically on the diskette. I wish I had all my old data. I used to pore over floppy track dumps and could read the MFM header (it's easy) to determine all sorts of stuff. It's not mysterious, just obscure.

At 04:06 PM 11/3/03 -0500, you wrote: >Hi, >Jim here with an on topic question. Since the mention of CP/M, et al, I

>been >looking for the CP/M-86 original version 1.0 on the 8 inch single density >floppy. I >have the manuals (reprints/copies). I also have CP/M-86 for the IBM-PC,

>5.25 and 3.5 inch media, However I have yet to find anyone with the 8

THE original CPM run on an Intel MDS-800 system with an 8080 CPU. That was LONG before the Intel 86/12 card came out. Go look at the code in the back of the manual. and had I have CPM running on the MDS-800 with 8" drives but IIRC it's ver 2.2. Dave Mabry might have an older version. Joe > >Thanks >Jim >WB2FCN > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Tom Jennings" <tomj(a)wps.com> >To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech(a)classiccmp.org> >Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 3:13 PM >Subject: Re: MDOS (Motorola EXORciser) disk format ? > > >> On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 14:54, Fred Cisin wrote: >> > > A friend of mine has a pile (55) 8" floppies which were created >> > > on a Motorola EXORciser MDOS system. Does anyone know if the data >> > > on these disks can be recovered on a CPM system or similar, or will >> > > he need to find an EXORciser? >> >> CP/M, since it's so close to the iron anyways, is probably a good way

>> do a sector dump of the disk. Copy it to a modern machine and >> post-process the data. >> >> Getting the sector data off is the task. If it's hard-sectored, you're >> probably screwed. (Turn the diskette inside it's sleeve; there should >> only be one (a pair?) of index holes. If you see 12 or so holes it's >> hard-sectored. Not many 8" diskettes were hard sectored.) >> >> There were two flavors of floppy controller chip in the 70's and 80's, >> th Western Digital chips and the NEC 765. I always preferred the WD >> chips (1791? 1793? I forget!) They were the best for diskette hacking. >> They would read any damn old FM or MFM signal, and you could dump to >> memory and do the bit extraction in software. Very cool. The NEC765, >> though nominally easier to do certain things, was a lot less flexible >> and far more fussy about format. >> >> (I used to run my 86DOS 0.86/MSDOS1.25/MSDOS2.00 system on DSDD 8" >> floppies with 9 1K sectors per track. I thought I was very cool for >> doing this (cringe)). >> >> The short of it is, if you have a CP/M system with a WD controller, you >> can write nice dumb code to do a 'track dump' if you have enough memory >> or a sector dump if you don't and see what's electrically on the >> diskette. >> >> I wish I had all my old data. I used to pore over floppy track dumps

> On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 14:54, Fred Cisin wrote:

If you just need the "user useable" data (no sector headings or whatever) I can probably be of assistance. If the format is known in my software, I can convert to nice clean data, otherwise I can make a "photocopy" of the disks. For more info, look at www.farumdata.dk/enimwin.htm Nico

I strongly suspect that you'll need an EXORciser system. Mike Haas has a couple but I don't know if they're working or even complete. What's on the disks? The EXORciser was a developement system for EXORbus computers. Joe At 02:07 PM 11/2/03 -0600, you wrote: