The DOS motivator

What the heck am I doing here?

I mentioned in the very first post, that DOS is not really state of the art any more. It may serve some educational, historic or nostalgia purposes. But as an operating system for every day use it has certainly a negligible market share. I am writing this series as I came across a large pile of old floppy disks somewhere in my basement. I wanted to get rid of them. And I wanted to check what is on there. Any hidden gems? Any long forgotten games? Any cool software that I loved to use in the 80-ies and 90-ies?

The situation

In the picture below, you will see just the portion of floppy disks that have already been transformed into floppy image files. Another 150 already went to the bin. And yet another 100 is waiting to be imaged.


You can see a lot of Microsoft stuff in there, some items from HP and of course many others. I will get to the hidden gems some time later. But at least you get a feeling. Every floppy takes about 1 minute to be imaged plus the time for handling it physically. Soon the floppy era will be over here.

The equipment

This turned out to be more of a problem than I expected initially. Why is that? Simple: my work horse machine runs Windows 10. The floppy drive is a HP multibay FDC and guess what, when run with the floppy drive inserted (default is DVD), Windows 10 does not have a suitable USB driver for it.

The FDC driver solution

To make everything work, I spun up a 32-bit Windows XP virtual machine inside VirtualBox. This comes with the appropriate FDC drivers out of the box. I then configured the specific USB-ID in VirtualBox as a pass-thru USB device and voila, the XP virtual machine recognizes the USB multibay floppy drive.

The software

For reading the disk images, I used RawWrite for Windows, which is available for Windows XP. The floppy images went to a VirtualBox shared drive and now my Windows 10 file system can see them.

In addition to RawWrite I sometimes had to use the DOS prompt commands copy or xcopy inside the virtual Windows XP machine. Old diskettes are sometimes hard to read. RawWrite gives up on them quite early whereas copy / xcopy do multiple retries and try to re-align the drive head. When copy was successful reading the sector, often times RawWrite would succeed in a second attempt as well.

Rumor has it that floppy diskettes are extremely unreliable. I cannot confirm that. Given that these floppies haven't been touched for about 20 years, I found only about 1% completely unreadable. You may argue that a data loss of 1% is quite significant but given the technology and the age of the media I would have expected the result to be worse.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bootstrapping DOS inside VirtualBox

Image
Bootstrapping DOS inside VirtualBox The biggest challenge with classic OSs like MS-DOS, DR-DOS and so on is the fact that there is no readily available downloadable ISO-image that you could just virtually insert into the virtual CD-tray of VirtualBox . For anything that is just a little bit younger than DOS, you can probably find the CD image file. Even Windows 95 (while still being available on floppy disk) was already distributed on a CD. The second 10 minutes exercise Floppy images - the solution Fortunately there is the concept of floppy disk images as well. These floppy image files can be inserted into the virtual disk drive of VirtualBox in the same way as CD images. The nice thing about that: it gives you the very original visual impression what it looked like, installing DOS on a brand new computer. What is missing though is the typical sound of these classic disk drives. So let's try DOS 5. You need 2 floppy images. Right click these links and choose "Sav
Read more

Adding Drivers - Part 1

Image
Adding initial drivers As mentioned in the previous blog post , this basic DOS machine still has some flaws. One CPU core fully utilized No CDROM / DVD image support We will fix these two now. Let's see how far we get. We might add some more stuff if time permits. As a prerequisite one additional floppy disk image will be needed. This is a custom compilation. The individual pieces are all available somewhere on the Internet for download. So feel free to use alternative sources. Right click the disk image below and save it somewhere on your host machine. DOS Addon floppy First changes to autoexec.bat When you clicked through the full MS-DOS 5 installation without making any adjustment, you will likely have the DOSshell enabled. The automatic startup of DOSshell has been removed in MS-DOS 6.x (as far as I know). Disadvantage of the DOSshell: we cannot see what drivers and programs are loaded during system startup as the result is immediately hidden by the
Read more

Adding Drivers - Part 2

Image
Making DOS network ready When I described how to add the first set of useful drivers, I already indicated that networking is also possible on MS-DOS machines. Actually when you look at today's network configuration settings (at least until Windows 7), you can easily spot the similarities to the very first network implementations on Microsoft operating systems. During this exercise, we will make use of the CD-ROM driver that was installed in the first driver session. You will need the following ISO-image, which contains all the MS-DOS related networking content that was previously available directly from Microsoft. Download link Microsoft-LAN-DOS.iso How to add networking to DOS Save the ISO image above to a place on your machine where VirtualBox runs. Start the MS-DOS Virtualbox. Insert the ISO-file into the VirtualBox virtual CD-ROM drive. Examine what is on the ISO image. To do that, switch to the command prompt if DOSshell is running. dir dir x:\ This should show yo
Read more