Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD
Hi everybody, thank you all for your contributions. @Karen: Eric is right, my original issue with FreeDOS floppy drive letter has been solved by executing the boot from CD in "harddisk image" easter egg mode. Also, later on I managed to install FreeDOS on a HD partition, and also booting from there grants correct access to floppy drive via the A: letter. Actually, now I've no more issues with FreeDOS, so this thread should be closed as being now widely off topic here. Since you all were so kind to chime in with useful tidbits, though, I'm going to provide some feedback here; then, if you are still interested in this issue, I suggest to move to the following ongoing thread on wcfed: https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/1221236-can-t-read-superblock-error-with-5-25-360k-floppy-drives @Travis: my BIOS supports just one floppy drive (likely for the reason geneb explained), that's why I detached the original 3.5 to make room for the 5.25 one. The drive cable has two connectors and the twist between them; I tried several combinations of jumpers and connectors and found that the end connector is the right one to attach the 5.25 drive to. I'm using a 5.25/360K drive because it's the only one at hand; however, I feel that I'll need to find a 5.25/1.2M drive, to overcome both the BIOS missing the 5.25/360K option, and the likely hardware issue due to the FDC not being able activate the drive (see https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/40967-panasonic-ju455-fdd?p=499283#post499283) @Eric: the above should explain why I only got SOME reactions from the drive. If this hardware issue is confirmed, I feel there's nothing I can do on settings/config that could work around it. I'm neither capable nor inclined to tamper with the drive at the hardware level. I will give VGACOPY another go, though. Again thanks for your help! Il 20/08/2021 22:58, Travis Siegel ha scritto: Hmm, I was not aware of that, thanks for the info. Always good to know possible causes of failure. Now there's one more to add to the pile. On 8/20/2021 3:05 PM, geneb wrote: On Fri, 20 Aug 2021, Travis Siegel wrote: There are multiple issues here. First, if you want to use both floppy drives, your floppy cable must have both connections on it, since there is rarely more than a single floppy controller slot on a motherboard. A quick note on this - if the motherboard is after a certain era, a two drive cable won't help. As a cost reduction measure, chipset manufacturers dropped the 2nd drive select pin off of the controller. The BIOS configuration screen should reflect this by only showing configuration information for a single floppy drive. apologies for the noise if this doesn't apply. :) g. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD
Ok so I tried with FreeDOS booting from the LiveCD. In this way, I can address the physical 5.25 drive on letter A:, but I always get a "Seek error" when trying to access to a disk by executing the command "dir a:". This seems very similar to the "Can't read superblock" error I get from Linux. Then I tried with the TESTCFG program, with no better luck: if I run TESTCFG A:, I get a "BIOS reports no drive" error. If I try to force the drive type with TESTCFT A: 360, I get a "No FDC interrupt!" error. ImageDisk itself does not go any better. I've googled for the "No FDC interrupt!" error, but I found little and nothing useful, at least in my eyes. Upon some oblique hints, I also tried to play with the drive jumpers, but I got nowhere nearer to my goal. At this point I'm basically stuck and unable to read those disks with the available hardware. There are just too many combinations to pursue a brute force approach, and I've no technical knowledge to prune the tree of the "obsiously" silly attempts. In the hope someone could still provide me with additional hints, I'm posting here all the information I've found about the involved hardware. Floppy Disk Controller: NEC 765 Floppy Disk Drive: Panasonic/Matsushita JU-455-5 (360KB) VGACOPY reports the first (and unique) drive to be on $3F0, as I assume it is expected. Jumpers of the drive are set as the manufacturer default, except for the RY (PC XT-AT compatibility), which is set to ON, and TM (terminator) which is set to OFF; documentation is here http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/panasonic/floppy/Panasonic_5.25-jumpers.pdf and also here It is worth noting that: - I'm not sure the drive does work (even if they react to issued commands) - I'm not sure the disks do work (but I have no other surely working drive to test them) - I removed the drive from a _venerable_ Olivetti M19 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M19), gave them a cleanup and mounted them (one at a time, of course, and changing the jumpers on the original secondary one). I had also to pick the original drive cable, since the connector on the motherboard is the same, but those drives have a flat connector (visible here, top left:https://i.postimg.cc/bNFhH1ST/PANASONIC-B.jpg); so it is possible that the cable is broken or simply not compatible with the controller. - I've found a long thread about an issue that seems very similar to mine; from the thread summary (https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/40967-panasonic-ju455-fdd?p=499710#post499710) it seems like a change in the hardware is in order, which is beyond my limits. Any further help is appreciated. Il 20/08/2021 14:19, Exilas ha scritto: Hi Eric, thank you very much for your help, really appreciated! First of all, my drive letter issue has been solved... more or less. In my first attempt, I picked the "Install to HD" menu item to see the available options, then chose to "Return to DOS". This way, I got A: as the main/current drive letter, which refers to the "FD13-CDBI" volume. This was the reason for my original post, since I believed this was the "standard" behavior. Then, I rebooted the LiveCD and out of curiosity I picked the last menu item "FreeDOS is a trademark...": to my surprise, the system did boot, asking me if I wanted to install to HD. Upon my "no", FreeDOS came up with C: as the main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-HDX86"), assigning A: to the physical floppy drive! Then I booted once again, this time picking the first menu item "Use FreeDOS 1.3 in live Environment mode", and the system loaded a LOT of packages it didn't bother to earlier, ending with R: as the main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-RAMDRV"), and with A: assigned to a new volume "FD13-HYDRA". So, it seems that FreeDOS has (at least) three different behaviors about how to assign drive letters, one of which is fortunately suiting my needs. Albeit a bit confusing for my newbie skills, at least I can work from there now :) Answering your questions. My BIOS does support a single floppy drive, so I detached the original 3.5/1.44M drive and replaced it with the 5.25/360K. So there is just one floppy drive in the system. Supported drives are 5.25/1.2M, 3.5/720K, 3.5/1.44M, 3.5/2.88M. The tool I've been suggested to use is Dave Dunfield’s ImageDisk (http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/), since it does not relies on BIOS settings; so, assuming the issue comes from the BIOS, it could allow me to read those disks. Of course, it is at all possible that all those disks are gone for good, since they are 25 years old or so; indeed, I did manage to access the floppy drive from both Linux and FreeDOS (after my second boot, as above) and I always get "Can't read superblock&qu
Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD
Hi Eric, thank you very much for your help, really appreciated! First of all, my drive letter issue has been solved... more or less. In my first attempt, I picked the "Install to HD" menu item to see the available options, then chose to "Return to DOS". This way, I got A: as the main/current drive letter, which refers to the "FD13-CDBI" volume. This was the reason for my original post, since I believed this was the "standard" behavior. Then, I rebooted the LiveCD and out of curiosity I picked the last menu item "FreeDOS is a trademark...": to my surprise, the system did boot, asking me if I wanted to install to HD. Upon my "no", FreeDOS came up with C: as the main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-HDX86"), assigning A: to the physical floppy drive! Then I booted once again, this time picking the first menu item "Use FreeDOS 1.3 in live Environment mode", and the system loaded a LOT of packages it didn't bother to earlier, ending with R: as the main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-RAMDRV"), and with A: assigned to a new volume "FD13-HYDRA". So, it seems that FreeDOS has (at least) three different behaviors about how to assign drive letters, one of which is fortunately suiting my needs. Albeit a bit confusing for my newbie skills, at least I can work from there now :) Answering your questions. My BIOS does support a single floppy drive, so I detached the original 3.5/1.44M drive and replaced it with the 5.25/360K. So there is just one floppy drive in the system. Supported drives are 5.25/1.2M, 3.5/720K, 3.5/1.44M, 3.5/2.88M. The tool I've been suggested to use is Dave Dunfield’s ImageDisk (http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/), since it does not relies on BIOS settings; so, assuming the issue comes from the BIOS, it could allow me to read those disks. Of course, it is at all possible that all those disks are gone for good, since they are 25 years old or so; indeed, I did manage to access the floppy drive from both Linux and FreeDOS (after my second boot, as above) and I always get "Can't read superblock" (Linux) or "Seek error" (FreeDOS) on the 5-6 disks I tried to read. BTW, it seems widely known that WinXP does not support 5.25/360K drives at all. Now, I just have to find a way to bring the ImageDisk tool into FreeDOS... not so trivial when working from a CD with no access to floppy disks, USB drives, network and hard disks. Oh well, I'll come up with something! :) Thanks again! Marco Il 20/08/2021 13:29, Eric Auer ha scritto: PS: I suspect that your computer with 5.25 drive also has a 3.5 drive, so the 5.25 may be B: and gets moved to "C:" while C: cannot be a floppy in FreeDOS? In that case, you could try to change jumpers, wiring and BIOS settings to make the 5.25 drive A: so it gets moved to B: when you boot from FreeDOS CD? However, as you say your BIOS does not support the drive at all, you can expect some problems anyway. Which tools do you plan to use to access 5.25 disks and which types of drives and disks does the BIOS support well? Does it support having 2 floppy drives or only one? I remember a case where only the BIOS failed to support two, while the hardware did support two, but it could also happen that the controller only supports one. Can you access the 5.25 with Linux or XP, by the way? Feel free to reply on the list in the original thread. Regards, Eric Il 20/08/2021 13:24, Eric Auer ha scritto: Hi! In theory, when you boot from a CD containing a virtual boot floppy image, the BIOS is supposed to move your real floppy drive to the next drive letter, so it should be B: When you use a MEMDISK bootable ramdisk, I expect similar effects. In case of the BIOS method, we could add a tool which leaves boot image mode and returns drive letters to normal, but of course this will have side effects by "taking out" the boot floppy (image) while you might still need files from it. If it is a problem for you that the real floppy moves to B:, you could also work with DOS commands to reassign letters, but I suspect similar problems as with leaving boot image mode, so I would recommend to stick to B: for real floppy until you can boot FreeDOS from an actual fixed drive or from an actual floppy. Another method would be to use a bootable harddisk image on the boot CD, so the real fixed disk gets moved to D: etc. and the real floppy stays at A: all the time. Which boot images use which style of boot image depends on which of our images you use (we also have USB thumb drive boot images) and which boot menu option you select :-) Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD
Hi all, sorry for the likely trivial question from a FreeDOS newbie. I'm trying to access a physical 5.25/360KB floppy drive connected to an old PC whose BIOS does not support that kind of drives (only 5.25/1.2M or 3.5). I've been suggested to try some DOS utilities, so I'm looking at FreeDOS as a way to run them. The PC is a dual boot WinXP/Linux, with each OS installed in one of the two connected hard disks; i would like to avoid messing with the current hard disks setup if possible, meaning that installing FreeDOS on the hard disk is not an option, so I burned a FreeDOS liveCD and booted successfully the system from there. However, as far as I understand now both A: and B: drives are simulated by FreeDOS, hence my question: is there a way to boot FreeDOS from LiveCD AND have A: drive to refer to the physical drive, or alternatively to assign a different drive letter (Z:) to the physical drive? Thanks! Marco ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
