[Coco] Another drive question

[Roger Taylor]

At 11:07 PM 12/5/2003 -0500, you wrote:
|The newer Microsoft Operating systems do not have a documented method of 
reading 256 byte sector media, and the old APIs do not work |on Windows 
2000, or Windows XP.


Then someone needs to beat these guys to a pulp until they talk, because 
apparently, there is a way.
http://home.t-online.de/home/dtr-kiel/os9max.htm




As soon as I find a reference on the net (and I've been looking hard, trust 
me), I will be one of the first to write a utility for reading/writing CoCo 
floppy disks from within Windows 2000 or XP.

Speaking of drives, I finally have my DEV1 system maxed out on physical 
space.  I'm surprise my p.s. hasn't coughed or choked.  Ofcourse, not 
everything kicks in at one time.

1- CD-ROM
1- CD-RW
1- DVD-R
1- 1.44m 3.5" floppy
1- 1.2m 5.25" floppy
1- 8-gig WinXP drive
1- 60-gig all-purpose drive
1- 5-gig Linux drive with RH 9.0 installed

I have found that for reading CoCo disks into your PC to PRESERVE them and 
maybe get them to a CD-ROM, that a standard 1.2meg 5.25" floppy drive works 
fine with both versions of retrieve.exe (original from Jeff, and Collyer's 
version).

I have had absolutely no luck whatsoever trying to trick the AWARD BIOS 
4.51PG into using any kind of real 360k floppy drive.  For now, I am just 
reading in my CoCo floppies and not trying to format or use dskini.exe on them.

So my PC is set up normally for DRIVE B: 1.2M, 5.25" which is available 
from Windows (ofcourse) for PC floppies, but when it's time for CoCo 
conversions, you have to boot using a Windows 98 startup floppy disk which 
gives you the MS-DOS mode needed.

My CoCoTower system (repack) has a 3.5" 720k as DRIVE 0 and a 5.25" 360K as 
DRIVE 1, a 42-megger for NitrOS-9, and an old loud 10-meg Tandy HD usually 
for backups and stuff.  Sometimes I unplug that one. :)

So in my floppy disk boxes I have about 75% or more converted to 3.5" disks 
that the CoCo uses just fine for OS-9 and Disk BASIC.  But there's a 
handful or two of 360k's that I never converted to 3.5" so I'm trying to 
move those over and also onto CD-ROM to hopefully preserver forever.... OR 
until a year or two when they make CD-ROM obsolete or when Windows changes 
file system formats and they can't read them anymore. :)


{Roger Taylor}