[Coco] Drive Wier 3: WARNING!

[Tim Fadden]

Ok, now that I have your attention! :-)

I purchased an hdb-dos rom chip and serial cable from Cloud-9.  Ha yoo, 
it worked perfectly as advertised.

My main reason for wanting it was in order to back up my coco os9 hard 
drive system, and to make real floppies from images.

The initial boot to os9 from DW3 worked flawlessly.

I then created a new boot floppy from the drive wire image.  When 
booting the system from the floppy, it would immediately crash upon 
accessing any of the /x# drive wire virtual disks.

Boisy Pitre and Robert Gault had this bug found and fixed in two or 
three days! yahoo  Now I can boot from a floppy, and access the three 
floppy drives, my hard drives, and the DW3 drives.

I set off to do a backup.  Looked like it was working until in the 
morning when I checked the result.  Oh Oh! dsave got out of sync Whats this?

Making a long story short, I was getting read/write errors on the DW3 
disks.  This was verry spiratic. only 3 to 5 random errors in 71 MB of 
transfer.

After several days of testing, and eliminating possibilities I found the 
problem!

The USB to Serial adapter was loosing data!  The 20+ year old hardware 
was working perfectly, DW3 was working perfectly!

After going to a true RS-232 port on the pc, I have been able to do 3 
complete backups with 0 errors.

That is a total of about 210 mega bytes, and over 21 hours of data 
transfer!  I have tested transfers from HD to DW3, and visa versa.

*******************************
Bottom line is; if your using a usb-serial adapter and want to make 100% 
sure you getting clean data do a lot of testing!

I don't know if it was the usb-serial module, or the drivers for it.  It 
may be the individual module, or the chip set on it (prolific).  As for 
me, I am sticking to a true RS-232 port.

Any how its a hoot that the newest piece of technology was the one 
causing the problem!

Thanks to all that helped me sort it out.

Tim Fadden