P112

[Dennis Boone]

 > Well, I have the dBit FDADAP.  Works great.  I have used them before
 > on a PC to access PDP-11 disks from PUTR and E11.  The P112 claims to
 > support 8" but I am finding it unlikely.  If it (well, at least the
 > OSes it runs) don't even know it only has 77 tracks I can't see how
 > anyone has done 8" disks on it.

I went spelunking in the ROM and BIOS sources the other day, and I don't
see any 8" drive stuff in there at all -- it's all 3.5" and 5.25".  I
looked at FORMAT too.  Am I looking at old code?

 > Why am I getting this sneaking suspicion that none of this stuff
 > actually works?

I haven't had mine out in a while, but last I did, the GIDE did work.
Seems like there was some ordering of operations on HD setup that I did
wrong the first time.

It doesn't help that there are no docs for the thing other than whatever
paper came with it.

Sanity check your software versions?  Mixing and matching variants can
be problematic since there are several generations and several forks of
the P112 and GIDE stuff; and there's at least one version of FORMAT
that's reputed to have a serious bug.

De