TDOS from HardDrive

[rietveld]

I am using a MicroFox IDE controller and a physical HD with a Physical floppy drive.

 

When I try to CLONE a file from the floippy to the HD it just corrupts the HD and I need to reimage it. Not sure what I am doing wrong

 

 Also is there a way to copy an entire physical disk to a hard disk partion like DOS's XCOPY or do I need to CLONE file by file

[NIAD]

Just finally getting serious about CP/M and T-DOS, so I got a lot of catching up to do!

 

All CLONE is doing is returning the program back to it’s original state as far as I recall. However, I think that a cloned file is an exact image of a Disk or DDP including Boot Block #00 so when you (de)Clone the image file, you are actually overwriting the IDE drives Boot Block and therefore corrupting it... hence why you have to reinstall the system on the IDE drive. Try Clone but set the destination to an actual Disk or DDP... could even be an image file on an ADE or VDD drive.

 

Also, since ADAMem DOS and SDL versions 1.8x and newer support IDE drives, do like I have done and use the emulator on your PC to do all the experimenting on the IDE HD image files. Easy enough to make multiple copies of them and if things go wrong, you just start again on a fresh copy. When you get everything working and setup properly, then write the IDE HD image file to CF Card, install in the Adam and away you go.

[NIAD]

To follow up...

 

Yes, do not CLONE a file back to the IDE drive! What it is doing is returning the IMAGEd file back to it’s original state. So say you IMAGE a disk containing AdamCalc... the IMAGE program will copy and compress all (or maybe just the used blocks) from the AdamCalc disk and create 1 file for easy transferring using a modem instead of transferring say roughly 15 files that make up the AdamCalc program and examples. Plus this images AdamCalc file will also contain the Boot and Directory blocks... 00 and 01.

 

Now if I want to expand this AdamCalc IMAGEd file using the counterpart program CLONE, I have to CLONE it to another disk or data pack and then file copy the appropriate files I need to the IDE HD. If I had CLONEd it to an IDE HD partition, it overwrites everything on that partition and renders that partition useless.

 

Again, this is from my 30+ year old memory, but pretty sure I am recalling all this correctly. You can, of course, use other compression programs like Crunch and Uncrunch without issue because they are just dealing with 1 file, not a whole series of files that make up a bootable disk or DDP.

 

As far as an XCOPY feature, not sure but you can use the program MAINT40 or MAINT80... it is the T-DOS version of File Manager.

[rietveld]

11 hours ago, NIAD said:

To follow up...

 

Yes, do not CLONE a file back to the IDE drive! What it is doing is returning the IMAGEd file back to it’s original state. So say you IMAGE a disk containing AdamCalc... the IMAGE program will copy and compress all (or maybe just the used blocks) from the AdamCalc disk and create 1 file for easy transferring using a modem instead of transferring say roughly 15 files that make up the AdamCalc program and examples. Plus this images AdamCalc file will also contain the Boot and Directory blocks... 00 and 01.

 

Now if I want to expand this AdamCalc IMAGEd file using the counterpart program CLONE, I have to CLONE it to another disk or data pack and then file copy the appropriate files I need to the IDE HD. If I had CLONEd it to an IDE HD partition, it overwrites everything on that partition and renders that partition useless.

 

Again, this is from my 30+ year old memory, but pretty sure I am recalling all this correctly. You can, of course, use other compression programs like Crunch and Uncrunch without issue because they are just dealing with 1 file, not a whole series of files that make up a bootable disk or DDP.

 

As far as an XCOPY feature, not sure but you can use the program MAINT40 or MAINT80... it is the T-DOS version of File Manager.

Thank you for the help.  sounds like the IMAGE program will copy my disk and the CLONE program will re create that disk image onto my hard drive.  I just burned a  BOOT rom for my Adam and set it up to autostart in TDOS

 

Thanks

[NIAD]

Yes, that is what Image and Clone do as far as I recall which is akin to the DOS program DCOPY.

 

Dcopy allows one to create an exact disk image file of an Adam disk from block #00 thru #159 (160K... using the standard Adam FDD as an example) to use with an emulator or copied to an SD Card for use on a real Adam with an SD Drive. It also allows one to copy the disk image file back to an Adam formatted disk to be used with a physical Adam FDD. If you copied that disk image back to your PC HardDrive in the root directory (which I don’t think you can anyway), you would overwrite the PC OS (DOS, Windows, Linux, etc.) and not be able to boot up your system from that HD partition anymore.