meulenbr@cst.philips.nl (Frans Meulenbroeks) (10/18/90)
Hi! I want to exchange floppies with a system running the Motorola Exormacs operating system. Unfortunately Exormacs has a non standard disk format. Therefore I would be very grateful if someone could help me with software or pointers to software which could do one (or more) of the following things: - read/write dos floppies under Exormacs - read/write tar floppies under Exormacs - read/write Exormacs floppies under dos - read/write Exormacs floppies under unix Also if you know another way of exchanging software between Exormacs-es and other systems, using floppies, I'd like to know. Thanks in advance! -- Frans Meulenbroeks (meulenbr@cst.philips.nl) Centre for Software Technology ( or try: ...!mcsun!phigate!prle!cst!meulenbr)
michael@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Michael Bodine) (10/21/90)
Frans Meulenbroeks (meulenbr@cst.philips.nl) writes: > I want to exchange floppies with a system running the Motorola > Exormacs operating system. Unfortunately Exormacs has a non standard The EXORmacs system ran the VERSAdos operating system. The EXORmacs systems have been out of production for several years -- four or five, i think. VERSAdos was end-of-lifed about two years ago even on Motorola VME systems, although we still have customers running it on MVME147-based systems. The large number of utilities under unix (System V/68) made it a much more logical choice for development systems, and the smaller, faster real-time kernels, such as VRTX or pSOS, made more sense for the real-time environment. Motorola now sells the VMEexec operating system, based on pSOS+, with development tools running under unix. > disk format. Therefore I would be very grateful if someone could help > me with software or pointers to software which could do one (or more) > of the following things: The disk format is described in the system documentation under the INIT utility. It is definitely non-standard! > - read/write dos floppies under Exormacs DOS floppies cannot be read nor created under VERSAdos without writing your own utility > - read/write tar floppies under Exormacs unix floppies cannot be read nor created under VERSAdos without writing your own utility > - read/write Exormacs floppies under dos VERSAdos floppies cannot be read nor created under DOS without writing your own utility > - read/write Exormacs floppies under unix There is a product that Motorola sells, called the VERSAdos Toolkit, which runs under System V/68 and allows you to create or read VERSAdos floppies from unix, although the EXORmacs used 8" floppies and today's systems use 5.25" or 3.5" flops. By serious re-cabling, rejumpering, reconfiguring and resysgening, it is POSSIBLE to plug 8" floppies into a unix system and make them work. It used to be easier before the days of SCSI. It was never fun. And it was never easy. Just possible. > Also if you know another way of exchanging software between > Exormacs-es and other systems, using floppies, I'd like to know. The most convenient method, though time-consuming, is using Kermit. There is a utility on VERSAdos called TRANSFER which has a Kermit compatible exchange format. Earlier versions of TRANSFER under VERSAdos did not include the Kermit mode. If you have one of these earlier versions, the file transfer mechanism is described in the system utilities manual under TRANSFER, and you'll have to write a c program under unix or DOS that will communicate. If your TRANSFER has Kermit, you can set it up in slave mode or interactive and transfer your files over a serial line. > Thanks in advance! Oh, i'll bet you say that to all the boys! Good luck! -- [ Michael Bodine, michael@chg.mcd.mot.com, Dial: (708) 576-7840, FAX: x8875 ] [ Motorola MCD; Loc IL38; 1100 Woodfield; Suite 334; Schaumburg, Il 60173 ]