Progress on NEC APC

From: Dwight Elvey <elvey_at_hal.com>
Date: Fri Apr 21 14:32:52 2000

"Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" <cisin_at_xenosoft.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Tony Duell wrote:
> > > DIR but they all come back with "NO FILE". Now of course this means
> > This message is also telling you a couple of good (?) things. Firstly
> > that the drive/controller is managing to read valid sectors off the disk
> > (so the drive is working, the heads are clean enough to read something,
> > etc). Otherwise you'd be getting the well-known BDOS errors.
>
> Also, by not getting error messages, that it's finding the sector numbers
> that it's looking for, therefore it has the expected number of bytes per
> sector and range of sector numbers (do the numbers start at 0, 1, 20, ...)
> I just checked, and the NEC 8" CP/M diskettes that i"ve seen have 256
> bytes per sector; but not the MS-DOS ones, therefore I retract my previous
> suggestion that these might be MS-DOS diskettes.
>

Hi Fred
 I take back what I said earlier. You are correct, the fact
that it did respond with "NO FILE" indicates that the
surface was being read. I haven't fiddle enough with
CP/M86 but I'd think that the post about USERs might have
some relevance. I don't think is is a MS-DOS disk
either. The FAT and such take up a lot of space and
surely wouldn't return "NO FILE" if CP/M tried to read it.
I think the first step is to try the STAT command as was
suggested by someone else. That will at least tell you
if space was reserved for any data by the CP/M OS.
It is still possible that someone used the disk to
write directly to sectors. There is a program called
VIEW or something that allows direct sector viewing.
That might be a good thing to try.
Dwight

 PS Sellam Ismail doesn't subscribe to this group
so could people responding to his questions please CC
him at:

dastar_at_siconic.com

 I have forwarded all of the earlier post so far.
Received on Fri Apr 21 2000 - 14:32:52 BST