CPM was Re: MDOS (Motorola EXORciser) disk format ?

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Mon Nov 3 19:19:50 2003

At 04:06 PM 11/3/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi,
>Jim here with an on topic question. Since the mention of CP/M, et al, I have
>been
>looking for the CP/M-86 original version 1.0 on the 8 inch single density
>floppy. I
>have the manuals (reprints/copies). I also have CP/M-86 for the IBM-PC, on
>5.25 and 3.5 inch media, However I have yet to find anyone with the 8 inch
>disk
>that is the bootable version. This ran on the Intel 86-12 CPU board

  THE original CPM run on an Intel MDS-800 system with an 8080 CPU. That
was LONG before the Intel 86/12 card came out. Go look at the code in the
back of the manual.


 and had
>drivers
>that could be modified for various devices. I have an IDE driver software
>fix that
>will let me use IDE drives with my SBC-86/12 system. Any help out there?

   I have CPM running on the MDS-800 with 8" drives but IIRC it's ver 2.2.
Dave Mabry might have an older version.

     Joe

>
>Thanks
>Jim
>WB2FCN
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Tom Jennings" <tomj_at_wps.com>
>To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech_at_classiccmp.org>
>Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 3:13 PM
>Subject: Re: MDOS (Motorola EXORciser) disk format ?
>
>
>> On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 14:54, Fred Cisin wrote:
>> > > A friend of mine has a pile (55) 8" floppies which were created
>> > > on a Motorola EXORciser MDOS system. Does anyone know if the data
>> > > on these disks can be recovered on a CPM system or similar, or will
>> > > he need to find an EXORciser?
>>
>> CP/M, since it's so close to the iron anyways, is probably a good way to
>> do a sector dump of the disk. Copy it to a modern machine and
>> post-process the data.
>>
>> Getting the sector data off is the task. If it's hard-sectored, you're
>> probably screwed. (Turn the diskette inside it's sleeve; there should
>> only be one (a pair?) of index holes. If you see 12 or so holes it's
>> hard-sectored. Not many 8" diskettes were hard sectored.)
>>
>> There were two flavors of floppy controller chip in the 70's and 80's,
>> th Western Digital chips and the NEC 765. I always preferred the WD
>> chips (1791? 1793? I forget!) They were the best for diskette hacking.
>> They would read any damn old FM or MFM signal, and you could dump to
>> memory and do the bit extraction in software. Very cool. The NEC765,
>> though nominally easier to do certain things, was a lot less flexible
>> and far more fussy about format.
>>
>> (I used to run my 86DOS 0.86/MSDOS1.25/MSDOS2.00 system on DSDD 8"
>> floppies with 9 1K sectors per track. I thought I was very cool for
>> doing this (cringe)).
>>
>> The short of it is, if you have a CP/M system with a WD controller, you
>> can write nice dumb code to do a 'track dump' if you have enough memory
>> or a sector dump if you don't and see what's electrically on the
>> diskette.
>>
>> I wish I had all my old data. I used to pore over floppy track dumps and
>> could read the MFM header (it's easy) to determine all sorts of stuff.
>> It's not mysterious, just obscure.
>>
>>
>
>
Received on Mon Nov 03 2003 - 19:19:50 GMT