On 12/2/19 4:55 PM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote: > > Well, I have the dBit FDADAP. Works great. I have used them before > > on a PC to access PDP-11 disks from PUTR and E11. The P112 claims to > > support 8" but I am finding it unlikely. If it (well, at least the > > OSes it runs) don't even know it only has 77 tracks I can't see how > > anyone has done 8" disks on it. > > I went spelunking in the ROM and BIOS sources the other day, and I don't > see any 8" drive stuff in there at all -- it's all 3.5" and 5.25". I > looked at FORMAT too. Am I looking at old code?
The menu you get when you hit Escape on startup has an option for setting a floppy as 8". Mine is ROM 5.7 which I believe is the next to last. Unless it is different than the other CP/M systems I have FORMAT should have no hardware dependent code in it. It was the OS that tracked and controlled what the underlying format of the floppies were. > > > Why am I getting this sneaking suspicion that none of this stuff > > actually works? > > I haven't had mine out in a while, but last I did, the GIDE did work. > Seems like there was some ordering of operations on HD setup that I did > wrong the first time. The GIDE seems to work. It appears to be FDISK that is broken. Given that, unless people had custom versions of FDISK I fail to see how anyone set up a hard disk on a P112. > > It doesn't help that there are no docs for the thing other than whatever > paper came with it. Thus the reason for me searching places like this for help. :-) > > Sanity check your software versions? Mixing and matching variants can > be problematic since there are several generations and several forks of > the P112 and GIDE stuff; and there's at least one version of FORMAT > that's reputed to have a serious bug. No mix or match. Just using the images provided on the CD that came with it. FORMAT works OK for 3.5" disks. I have had no luck trying to FORMAT 5.25" or 8" floppies. And I can't even get that far on a hard disk. bill