Very new user / rc2014 booting with CF

[Chris Wall]

Hello,

Bear with me - I'm at that phase where I don't know what I don't know. Based on what I've found below I'm *hoping* this is just a "flash your rom / update your CF card" situation. I am also aware that 48 hours ago this was a bunch of parts on my desk and I could have screwed any number of things up. 

The less version: My RC2014 Zed Pro boots fine to all bios modes. I additionally have the CF card and the RTC card that are add on options from Z80 kits. All ROM applications seem to work fine. My CF card's partitions are readable and traversable with CP/M and Z system when booted from ROM. The card seems healthy when placed in a CF reader on my linux system (enumerates to sda,sdb,sdc->sdc2,sdd). 

When the system boots it states that it has: RomWBW HBIOS v3.4.0, 2023-12-31

What does not work: Selecting a disk to boot from. The preloaded card shows as:

Disk 2      IDE0:       CompactFlash      977MB,LBA

Selecting 2, produces:

*** WARNING: HBIOS/CBIOS Version Mismatch ***

...enumerates the disks...  and then drops to

Bdos Err On A: Select

Selecting 2.1, 2.2:

ZSDOS error on A: No Drive
Call: 13

(repeating in loop)

Selecting 2.3:

Booting Disk Unit 2, Slice 3, Sector 0x0000C300...

Volume "CP/M 3.0" [0x0100-0x1000, entry @ 0x0100]...\r\n\r\n*** Disk I/O failure

(when I tap keys I get several +++ BAD INT @054B[1044:0082:0D0D:0540:FEF4:8C79:1908] errors)

Then finally an ungraceful: CPMLDR error:  failed to open CPM3.SYS

Help is appreciated. Thanks to all already, this is a wonderful project, and after 30 years of working with Linux it's good to get back to my "fiddling with jumpers and worrying about memory addresses" days. 

- C

[Chris Wall]

Addendum: It ends up that my multcard reader creates multiple disk entries even when there isn't a flash card in it. Regardless, the CF card does show up to linux as being alive and on that partition (the 2 was a typo.. it's 1...). Apologies for the mistakes and the "double tap" on this one. 

Regardless, I don't want to start messing with flashing unless this is really the correct direction forward. I'd hate to brick the thing with less than 8 hours in on it :) 

[Chris Wall]

Okay, now I just feel silly for asking: I found an older hd512k_combo.img (3.4.0) that matched my ROM and placed it on my spare 64M card. Everything works great, so I am going to assume that flashing up to the current version will be the next step. 

I will tackle the "why is minicom erroring/timing out on x/zmodem when uploading" problem later. 

Aside from a healthy bit of embarrassment hopefully my misadventure will give others searching around on this issue something to save some time: Be aware that the ROM you get in the kit may not match what's on the CF card. Now I know that matters quite a bit. 

Thanks again 

[Wayne Warthen]

Sorry for being slow to respond.  The good news is that you absolutely nailed the issue.  In a nutshell, the ROM and the OS files on disk must be the same vintage.  In your case, you might consider just jumping to the current version of both (download from the RomWBW GitHub Releases page).  The current stable release is v3.5.1, but v3.6 is scheduled to be release by the end of the month.

Thanks, Wayne

[Massimo]

"I will tackle the "why is minicom erroring/timing out on x/zmodem when uploading" problem later."

Are you using an USB-C FTDI adapter?

If yes I had issues with them, I don't know why but no matter what Tera Term (on Windows) wasn't having it no matter what I did. I switched to an older Mini USB adapter and boom worked flawlessly.

Are you using an FTDI adapter on an Apple Silicon Mac?

If so it seems there are issues with the buit-in drivers, you can try installing the ones from FTDI but I haven't had any luck with Minicom specifically, but those did work using ZOC Terminal which however is not free, I just used the free trial period to do more testing and confirmed it was a driver issue

[Chris Wall]

Much simpler: I had incorrect arguments to XM, and I also needed lower clock 2 so the second port operates at 57.6k. 

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