GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) (08/19/88)
While others out there might want to confirm me on this, I
don't believe it is possible to read "standard" (= IBM PC?) floppies
with a Rainbow because of ***hardware*** limitations. That is,
the RX50 drives in a Rainbow can only read one side of a disk;
the "standard" 360K floppies are double-sided. No software program
will be able to read a double-sided disk unless the hardware supports
this.
There are other possibilities, though. For example, if you're
willing to restrict yourself to single-sided PC floppies, you may
be able to read from/write to them with the Rainbow drives (just
be sure to turn MEDIACHK on and format the disks on a PC first).
I've done this using AT disks (use FORMAT /1 on the AT)
and heard it works on a PC, too. Of course, this halves the
available disk space, but it's cheap.
There's also a IBM PC disk drive that can be added to your
Rainbow; it's called an I-Drive. As the name suggests, you
simply treat it as drive I, and access it as you would the
other Rainbow drives. It's available from a couple places that
sell Rainbow products. One such place is Suitable Solutions,
(408) 727-9090. Another is Rainbo-Works (209) 832-1001.
For those who don't mind getting their hands dirty, it
is possible to modify the Rainbow BIOS and replace the RX50
drives with more common PC-type drives so that you gain
PC data compatibility without losing the ability to use
your Rainbow floppies.
George
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/*--------------------------------------------*/link@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (Richard Link) (08/20/88)
In article <Added.IX3A83y00Ui38M8k9e@andrew.cmu.edu> GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) writes: > > While others out there might want to confirm me on this, I >don't believe it is possible to read "standard" (= IBM PC?) floppies >with a Rainbow because of ***hardware*** limitations. That is, >the RX50 drives in a Rainbow can only read one side of a disk; >the "standard" 360K floppies are double-sided. No software program >will be able to read a double-sided disk unless the hardware supports >this. > Correct. The Rainbow has single-sided drives, so you can't read double sided floppies. You can read single-sided floppies formatted on an IBM PC. You can also write to single-sided IBM floppies using a program called MediaMaster which runs only on CP/M on the Rainbow. So first you have to boot CP/M, run MediaMaster, and go through their menus to write a Rainbow CP/M or MS-DOS disk to a single-sided IBM formatted disk. MediaMaster WILL allow you to format a single-sided IBM disk using the Rainbow drives. HOWEVER, I have sometimes (not all that often, but enough to be a problem) found that my Zenith PC clone will not read disks formatted on the Rainbow. MediaMaster does state very clearly that this problem may sometimes occur. Also, when actually using MediaMaster to format a single- sided IBM disk, it gives a warning something like "formatting a 48 TPI disk using a 96 TPI drive". But it does usually work correctly. I have found that it is a great inconvenience working in Rainbow MS-DOS, writing to an MS-DOS disk, booting CP/M, and then writing the Rainbow MS-DOS disk to an IBM compatible 1S1D disk. !!! The reason why this state of affairs is such is that DEC would not give Intersecting Concepts (the publishers of MediaMaster) the driver specs for using the 8088 to format the drives (or something to that effect). Intersecting Concepts had to use the Z80 to do the formatting, and hence CP/M. I have not heard of using MEDIACHK to write to an IBM 1S1D disk. Is this method reliable? I find the easiest way to transfer data from my Rainbow to PC clone is to kermit to/from my lab computer. Then I don't have to worry about running out of room on a 180K disk. Thanks, DEC! Rick Link link@ssl.berkeley.edu