[rescue] Osbourne Executive, can't get er to boot

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 05:34:52PM -0400, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
>I have an Osbourne Executive.

I looked it up on the Wikipedia and it says that it had single sided
double density disks. 


>I tried the IMD files I found on one site, that are supposed to be 
>the 3 CP/M system disks. One point of confusion to me is that the 
>Exec. was supposed to have DD/DD floppies. But the images are all 
>single sided.
>
>I've tried writing the disks with IMD using the actual osbourne 
>floppy drive, and switched drives.

>Anyone have experience with these things?

no, but I have a lot of experience with CP/M systems in general. 

A 5/14 SSDD disk should hold enough to boot, have wordstar on it and a few
documents. The executive has two drives, so there should be plenty of space
on it. 

If I remember correctly, there are problems writing disks that can be
read on 40 track drives with 80 track drives. In plain English disks
written on a drive that predates the PC/AT will have trouble reading disks
written on quad density (720k) 5 1/4 drives or AT (1.2g) drives.

There may also be problems writing the disks using older programs with
modern floppy controllers. 

There is a way to do it, but I can't at the moment remember how. I just 
remembered that you had to look for "BBC Acorn floppy disks" to find it.

http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm

There also is on a very old PC/Blue library disk a CP/M emulator for DOS.
If you can get the files off of the disks, then you can run the programs
under the emulator. I understand that is not what you want to do, but if you 
have files that you need to use and can't get the Osborne to run, it might
help.

http://cd.textfiles.com/pcblue/blu185.arc

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
To help restaurants, as part of the "stimulus package", everyone must order 
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