thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) (11/27/90)
Though many have heard my "MS-DOS vadanya" jokes, I've got to admit that I recently saw something that really impressed me, and this was because a friend of a friend lost the use of his borrowed '386 machine and was loaned a 3B1 so he could continue writing his novel ... except, his backup disks from the '386 were 3-1/2" 720K DOS-format. Well, I helped my friend by bringing over a 3-1/2" drive to read the files in on the UNIXPC. Took all of about 5 minutes to make the (temporary) long 34-wire ribbon cable and hook it all up. Then used Emmet Gray's latest mtools 2v0p2 to read them in without a hitch into a UNIX directory. Now the problem was to get the files over to the other guy's UNIXPC and to place them on the DOS partition. Did some reading (yeah, finally RTFM! :-) and browsing of Emmet's code and I asked my friend "What's dvd000?" BINGO! Mtools was able to read, write, create sub-dirs, etc into the DOS73 partition ALL from the UNIX side. Wow! So, a quick "uuto" of the files-read-from-floppy and the Mtools package over to the other guy's system, a simple "mcopy", and a test with WordPerfect 5.1 on the other guy's system on the remotely-booted DOS73 partition and everything worked just fine. To say the least, I was simply amazed. And a hearty "THANK YOU!" to Emmet Gray for his "mtools" software suite. Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]