Compact Flash Drives

[karlab]

Hi

Is it possible to use 4 and 8MB Compact Flash as CP/M drives?

I found 2 ways to initiate the compact flash drives:

1) described by G. Searle and involves using 64 and 128 MB drives.

2) cpmtools, but the documentation was not so clear. 

The ROMWBW appears to format the CF cards differently, or am I mistaken?

Karl

[Steve Cousins]

Hi Karl

There is a Compact Flash format App included with the SCWorkshop/SCMonitor distribution. It runs from SCM and should format Compact Flash Cards as small as 8MB. It detects the card size and formats accordingly. I've used it with cards from 16MB upwards.

As you say, CP/M is only provided for 64 or 128MB formatted drives. As a result you will get an error if you try to access one of the non-existent drives, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be a problem using smaller cards.

I've attached the RC2014 version HEX file. Download to SCM and "G8000" to run it.

I believe you are right about the format being different in ROMWBW.

Steve

[karlab]

Thank you Steve

I will have a look at it tomorrow.

Karl

[Alan Cox]

ROMWBW splits the media into multiple drives with some boot space on
the first one (which is also properly arranged to allow for partition
tables and boot blocks unlike Grants)

For cpmtools to access the first drive use:

diskdef romwbwhd
seclen 128
tracks 1040
sectrk 64
blocksize 4096
maxdir 512
skew 0
boottrk 16
os 2.2
#for emulator uncomment
#offset 1K
end

You can use the 'offset' command to do this with the emulator (add
'offset 1K' for the virtual CF cards).

You can also use the offset command to access the other drives.

ROMWBW uses CP/M 2 layouts so is limited in 'disk' size quite severely
compared with CP/M 3 or MP/M.

[Alan Cox]

And to answer the other bit - 8MB yes, 4MB no

Where on earth did you find a 4MB CF card that still works 8)

Alan

[karlab]

Thank you, Alan and Steve, for your replies.

I have now had a bit time to look into the CF issues.

Regarding ROMWBW using CF cards; formatting and transferring files in both directions is no problem. Have tried 4, 8, 64 and 128 MB card.

Maybe of obvious reasons, I am not able to make the CF bootable in ROMWBW.

Using SCM: I have been able to replicate the procedure that Steve described on the 8MB CF, but get an error using the 4MB card.

Small Computer Monitor - RC2014
*Ready
*
*g8000
Compact Flash card format v0.4 by Stephen C Cousins
Card size: 4MB
Number of logical drives to format: 0
WARNING: Format will erase all data from the card
Do you wish to continue? (Y/N)
Formatting drives: AB
Time-out error
*

How do I get CP/M on the newly formatted 8MB CF using steve's method? Maybe it's not possible?

Third option is the cpmtools. I am struggling here and the documentation is not straightforward.

cheers

Karl

[Steve Cousins]

Karl

Take a look at SCWorkshop\SCWorkshopProjects\CPM v2.2 PutSys Plus

Steve

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018, 22:33 Steve Cousins <steve...@gmail.com wrote:

Karl

Take a look at SCWorkshop\SCWorkshopProjects\CPM v2.2 PutSys Plus

Steve

On Thursday, 1 November 2018 22:08:27 UTC, karlab wrote:

Thank you, Alan and Steve, for your replies.

I have now had a bit time to look into the CF issues.

Regarding ROMWBW using CF cards; formatting and transferring files in both directions is no problem. Have tried 4, 8, 64 and 128 MB card.

Maybe of obvious reasons, I am not able to make the CF bootable in ROMWBW.

You need the right header on the ROMWBW image so it knows how much to load and where. There is an example in the Fuzix rc2014 platform code. Note the boot code in ROMWBW breaks if your size isn't an exact number of blocks.

Alan

[Bill Shen]

There is a long description of various ways of transferring CP/M files to new CF disk here:
http://linc.no/products/linc80-sbc1/software-for-the-linc80/#imgtransfer

Personally I find the easiest way is using XMODEM.COM instead of DOWNLOAD.COM.  XMODEM is quite reliable and can transfer quickly without any inter-character delays.
  Bill

[Jon Langseth]

I'd like to chime in and recommend the PutSys Plus methodthat Steve C has written for getting the card bootstrapped. As Steve said himself earlier, it's part of the SCWorkshop.

PutSys Plus is fast, and less likely to have issues with the CF card being smaller than 64MB than any of the other methods described on the linked page. After getting the card putsys'ed, you'd need to get files onto the CF card, and there the download.com+xmodem.com approach shines, as Bill said.

Thank you for the link to my documentation page Bill, I'm very glad that it's of help!

[Karl Albert Brokstad]

Ty, I will try when i return home from travelling. 

Karl

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[Bill Shen]

That is a great article summarizing various ways of getting CP/M into a CF disk.  I've tried many of them (plus other ways) during last couple years of CP/M developments for 680x0, Z280 and Z80.  Interestingly the one method I've not tried is using DOWNLOAD.COM.  Instead, I'd converted XMODEM.COM to Intel Hex format and uploaded it first into a new CF.  Instead of SAVE 2 DOWNLOAD.COM, I do SAVE 17 XMODEM.COM.  Once I have XMODEM.COM in the new CF disk, I use it to transfer the rest of CP/M files.
  Bill

[karlab]

Hi All

I have now had time to follow your tips and advice.

I used the formatter and putsys in SCWorkshop.

Managed to format and to put CP/M on the 8 MB CF drive.

Thank you all.

Karl