brad@bcars241.bnr.ca (Brad Shapcott) (03/06/91)
Archive-name: hardware/floppies/uneekit/1991-03-04 Archive: atari.archive.umich.edu:/atari/diskutils/uneekit.zoo [141.211.164.8] Original-posting-by: brad@bcars241.bnr.ca (Brad Shapcott) Original-subject: Re: MSDOS & SUNSparc1 Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) In article <1991Mar2.045404.2229@rice.edu> bro@eunomia.rice.edu (Douglas Monk) writes: > >SUN->PC will also work fine. The problem with the earlier versions of mtools >was that by default, it only wrote one copy of the FAT, and Ataris depend on >the second copy. IBMs work OK with only the one FAT for some reason. > >I had the problem, and this is indeed the fix, except the flag is DUP_FAT. >As someone else pointed out, a later MTOOLS version fixed this problem, >but I have had trouble with our site's installation of it, so I still use >my own copy (which *I* support :-). I ftp'ed MTOOLS 2.0.3 (originally trying 129.229.1.101, which gave me truncated files three times, so I think the files there are messed -- I eventually got them from 129.217.64.63 where they were in comp/msdos/mtools). The patches that were in the directory seem to be unecessary, as they are already applied to the sources there. Anyways, I think the only thing I did was add "#define SPARC 1" to devices.c (this would change if you were on a different machine) and compiled. The disks I used were Atari ST formatted with a MSDOS boot sector written over with DCFormat 3.0 (this program will also do an 2-9-80 normal (ie non-skewed) format on the disk before laying out the MSDOS boot block. Formatting from the SUN may be possible, but since this other format works, I haven't bothered. >Caveats: like IBM formatted disks, there won't be a random serial number >on the disk, so you need to exercise caution putting them in: either keep >them write-protected in the Atari or swap another disk in and out between >any two of them. Also remember that you can only use double-sided regular >density (720K) floppy format), not single-sided (360K) nor high density >(1.44M) formats. The program 'uneekit.zoo' on atari.archive.umich.edu in /atari/diskutils/ is supposed to write a random serial on the disk. Haven't tried it yet, but now that I'm doing Atari<->SUN swaps I suppose I'll run it over some disks. The only other SUN caveat I might add is that if you are not using the floppy presently you made need to fire up the 'fd' driver. I know I had to do that on this SUN I'm on, even though the floppy drive had been installed some months before I started using the machine (I guess everyone else thought it was a quaint aesthetic feature of a SUN Sparc, and not actually meant for use). >Doug Monk (bro@rice.edu) > >Disclaimer: These views are mine, not necessarily my organization's. Anyways, my thanks to those that helped me with this question. I brought home two disks with the Sozobon compiler and some utilities this weekend. Without this I was faced with (ack, arrrrrgh) hours long kermit transfers from our local mainframe. brad@bnr