DSDD 8" disks readable by ITC CP/M

[emilsarlija]

Hi all,

Just wondering how you guys create DSDD 8" disks readable by ITC CP/M as I'm having issues.

I format the floppies DSDD using INIT.COM in either CDOS 2.58 or MICAH CP/M and then transfer software to the floppy using the 8" DSDD CDOS floppy definition in 22DISK running on a PC with an 8" drive. The definition file is cpmdisks.reg on this page:

http://cpmarchives.classiccmp.org/ftp.php?b=cpm/Software/cpmdisks/

MICAH CP/M and CDOS 2.58 can run the programs I transferred but ITC CP/M can read the directory but crashes when I try to run a program. It seems the filesystem for ITC CP/M is a little bit different.

Please note that I have successfully created boot disks on my PC and my PC floppy controller supports single density.

Any suggestions or tips?

Many thanks,

Emil

[Roger Hanscom]

Hi Emil,

That's interesting because I have never had a problem formatting DSDD with INIT.COM and using the resulting diskette with ITC CP/M.  I find that they are fully interchangeable.  I usually don't bother with CDOS (other than running INIT.COM, because I find it of very limited usefulness!).  Of course, I have long ago ditched my *real* 8" drives, and run 5.25" HD instead.  I doubt that 8" vs. 5.25" would have any effect on what you are seeing.  I suspect that 22DISK is doing something odd.  I used to have a 22DISK disk definition to copy software to diskettes initialized with INIT.COM, but my PC that could handle the odd SD/DD format died years ago, so I haven't used it in a long time.

I use Martin Eberhard's excellent version of XMODEM almost exclusively now.

Roger

[jim30109]

I use ITC with a pair of 3.5" drives that look like DS/DD 8" drives to the system.

I format them with INIT under CDOS, but then boot to ITC and use PIP or XMODEM to actually transfer files. (I also use Martin's XMODEM configured for the TUART card.)

I don't remember the details, but I do remember having trouble with disks where I had moved some files to the disk under CDOS and then went on to work with them under ITC CP/M. If I recall correctly, I could read them with no problem and use PIP to pull things off of them, but for anything I wanted to read and write to under ITC CP/M I needed to start with it freshly formatted and do all the file transfers under CP/M. (If I remember right, it was kind of random about how much I could use a disk that I didn't prepare that way before it was corrupted.)

Bottom line for me has been that if I'm using it under ITC CP/M, I had better always let ITC CP/M create the directory entries. (With the exception of copying files off a read-only disk created under CDOS if I needed to.) I never was able to figure out why, but I didn't really dig that deep since it wasn't that hard for me to work around with the way I tend to do things.

Thanks,

Jim

[Emil Sarlija]

Thanks all for your input. 

I've considered using 5.25" HD drives but, believe it or not, I have considerably more 8" disks so I haven't gone beyond trying it out and confirming it works.

MICAH would be perfect were it not for the whacky behaviour when running MBasic.

By the way, I found a post from 2009 regarding a disk formatter runs under ITC, which it currently lacks, called FORMATI.COM but I can't find it anywhere. Anybody have a link to this? 

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