Yay, now I need some Osborne boot media!

[Jules Richardson]

On 11/24/2014 11:05 AM, drlegendre . wrote:
> What we want here is 360K physical, right?

In PC parlance, yes. The XT's most likely to be right; the AT might have 
"1.2MB" drives which will be no good - although they'll read 40-track media 
OK, they won't write it reliably.

> It still leaves a chicken-and-egg problem, as neither of those machines
> have any outward connectivity, nor do I have any media with something like
> Laplink or an ISA NE2000 driver sitting around.

Do you use the XT often? If not, personally I'd drop that drive into 
"something else" - even if it's a machine that just has a 3.5" drive too, 
where you can then sneakernet disk images via 3.5" media from a system that 
does have 'net connectivity.

This is what I do currently; I do have ISA network boards kicking around, I 
just haven't got the tuits together yet - but I expect even then I'll still 
download on a modern system, and then FTP data across to the imaging 
machine.  Incidentally, I did get burned big-time by an apparent bug in the 
FTP client I was using on my imaging system back in the UK, which resulted 
in the trashing of my entire image archive (that imaging system's still in 
storage, and I'm hoping the hard disk is still good when I eventually get 
to it) - so I am a bit wary of DOS-based network connectivity!

I'm using a 40-track drive borrowed from my Tandy 1000 for imaging, just 
because I know I have spare drives back in the UK which will be here 
eventually, so I'm reluctant to spend money on more this side of the Atlantic!

cheers

Jules