Progress on NEC APC

From: Bill Dawson <whdawson_at_mlynk.com>
Date: Fri Apr 21 11:28:31 2000

Sellam,

<snip>

-> I stuck the disks I'm trying to recover data from in the B:
-> drive and did a
-> DIR but they all come back with "NO FILE". Now of course this means
-> that the disks contain no files but I'm thinking there has to be
-> something
-> wrong here.
->
-> The system disk is CP/M-86. I still don't know what format the disks in
-> question are but I assumed they were also CP/M-86. What could be
-> amiss here, aside from the possibility that the disks ARE empty? What
-> utilities are available to me on the system disk to view a raw
-> dump of the target disks?
->
-> I can't believe after all this effort that these damn disks contain
nothing.


I hope the following is some help to you. I don't know CP/M very well yet.
However, I do know enough to be dangerous. What I write below pertains to
CP/M 3 and most of it is directly from the DR CP/M 3 manual. I don't have
any exposure to CP/M 86 (yet) so I don't know if this is true for that
version, but I imagine it should be.

CP/M further identifies all files by assigning each one a user number which
ranges from 0 to 15. The number is assigned when the file is created and
allows you to separate the files into sixteen file groups. This number will
precede the drive identifier as in "4B>" means user number 4, drive B. Use
the command USER to change the user number as in "A>USER 3" to change to
user area 3 on drive A. You can change both the user number and the drive by
entering the new user number and drive specifier together at the system
prompt as in "A>3B:", which will return a prompt of "3B>" to signify the
change.

Most commands can access only those files that have the current user number.
For example, if the current user number is 7, a DIR command with no options
displays only the files that were created under user number 7.

So, perhaps the files you are looking for are under a user number other than
0?

The SHOW command can also be useful for you. The format is SHOW {d:}{[SPACE
|LABEL |USERS |DIR |DRIVE]}

d: refers to the drive number you wish to examine.

Of particular use to you will be SHOW {d:)[USERS} as in A>SHOW[USERS] or
A>SHOW B:[USERS]

This will display the current user number and all the users on the drive and
the corresponding number of files assigned to them. For example:

A>SHOW[USERS]
Active User : 1
Active Files: 0 2 3 4
A: # of files: 95 40 1 26
A: Number of free directory entries: 350
A>

With this, at least you can tell if there are any files on the disks you
have.

I hope this is some help to you.

Bill

whdawson_at_mlynk.com
Received on Fri Apr 21 2000 - 11:28:31 BST