[Coco] Backup CoCo floppy directly to PC using Drivewire & HDB-DOS?

[Fedor Steeman]

Hi all,

I still got a little birth day money to spend, so I was considering what
neat stuff to get for my CoCo. I already intend to get the Bluetooth Pak,
although CoCoNet is not ready yet.

However, regarding my little endeavor discussed earlier on the list (see
below) I was wondering whether DriveWire can solve a current problem for me.


Wanting to back up a lot of diskettes, I was wondering whether I using
DriveWire and HDBDOS simply can use the BACKUP command to directly transfer
a diskette's content to PC.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 Cheers,
Fedor

BTW I love what Roger did with his site...

2009/1/19 Robert Gault <robert.gault at worldnet.att.net>

> Fedor Steeman wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Robert. That sounds like some interesting and important
>> information
>> for my little endeavour.
>>
>> Right now I stand with a huge library of hundreds of diskettes that I
>> would
>> like to store on my hard disk as virtual floppies and then make available
>> through the internet. Until now I would backup these (5.25" floppies) to
>> 3.25" floppies using the CoCo and then would read them in on the PC. Of
>> course, that is a bit tedious for so many disks. So it seemed to me I
>> would
>> save a lot of time if I could leave out the CoCo out of the equation and
>> read the floppies in directly on my PC instead. The drive I wanted to use
>> to
>> this end was previously used to read and write these same disks.
>>
>> Are you saying that I can save the trouble and keep on doing the backing
>> up
>> on the CoCo, because success is far from guaranteed with doing it directly
>> on the PC?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Fedor
>>
>>
> If you are lucky, you can hook the 5.25" drive to the PC and read the disks
> directly. That will require your PC can work with your 5.25" drive and, as
> others have explained better, the disks were formatted such that the PC can
> read them. See Bill Barnes message replying to Torsten's replying to mine.
>
> Let's say you are lucky. Then the best bet for a neat storage of your disks
> is to use the VCC emulator, which can read real floppies, attached to a .vhd
> hard drive image holding as many multiples of 256 Basic disks as you desire.
> You can just BACKUP the real floppy to an RGBDOS .vhd drive #.
> If you are not lucky, you will need to use an intermediate transfer from
> the Coco to the PC. It could be a 3.5" disk (formatted on the PC as a Coco
> disk) to transfer data or a null modem connection using Ultimaterm and a PC
> terminal program.
> If you are not lucky it will be a lot of work to transfer the files, unless
> you can make use of Roger's future CocoNet or perhaps DriveWire from
> Cloud-9.
>
> As regards the .vhd hard disk image, RGBDOS permits changing the Disk Basic
> offset values stored in the "ROM" on the fly. That means you can easily
> access Mx256 drive #s where M depends on how large you make the .vhd image.
> Of course you can just have more than one .vhd image. The only restriction
> is the offset value must fit in three bytes. The largest offset is thus
> $FFFFFF bytes.
> This technique is also useful with a real Coco3 hard drive system from
> Cloud-9. Use a large IDE drive and you can do the same thing with HDBDOS
>  just by POKEing new offset values into the correct DOS locations.
>
>
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