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  • Formatting CP/AM partitions on a CF card

    From A2CPM@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 21 02:14:17 2022
    I have a CP/AM 3.5 inch boot disk that displays a drive map when booting on a Platinum IIe The two 3.5 inch drives show as drives A: and B:. The two 5.25 inch drives show as drives C: and D:. The two partitions on a 64 MB compact flash card show up as
    drives E: and F:. The compact flash card is accessed via a SCSI flash card reader/writer connected to an Apple SCSI controller card. There are CP/AM programs for formatting 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks. I can find nothing in the CP/AM 5.1 docs about
    formatting "hard drive" partitions. As I compose this message it occurs to me that it might be possible to use the 3.5 inch disk formatting program with resulting huge loss in space but that program wants the target disk in drive A:. Ideas, anyone?

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  • From I am Rob@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 21 13:06:11 2022
    On Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 3:14:18 AM UTC-6, A2CPM wrote:
    Ideas, anyone?

    The first question is how did you create the partitions for E: and F: to begin with?

    I no longer have my Z80+ card, so can't quite remember the details, but I think the hard drive partitions were created on the ProDos side. The CPM disk came with two formatting options for the floppies. FORMAT.COM for 5.25 disks and FDISK.COM for 3.5
    disks.

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  • From Steven Hirsch@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 21 16:56:33 2022
    On 7/21/22 05:14, A2CPM wrote:
    I have a CP/AM 3.5 inch boot disk that displays a drive map when booting on
    a Platinum IIe The two 3.5 inch drives show as drives A: and B:. The two 5.25 inch drives show as drives C: and D:. The two partitions on a 64 MB compact flash card show up as drives E: and F:. The compact flash card is accessed via a SCSI flash card reader/writer connected to an Apple SCSI controller card. There are CP/AM programs for formatting 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks. I can find nothing in the CP/AM 5.1 docs about formatting "hard drive" partitions. As I compose this message it occurs to me that it might be possible to use the 3.5 inch disk formatting program with resulting huge loss in space but that program wants the target disk in drive A:. Ideas, anyone?

    Wow, it's been a long time (I wrote the CP/AM 5.x BIOS and many of the utilities). The BIOS should automatically recognize SmartPort devices, but I don't know if the Apple SCSI card looks like one in firmware. If you've used the Apple ProDOS utilities to partition the CF card there's no low-level
    format required. The challenge is how to create a CP/M directory structure that CP/AM understands. There was a Sider driver, so buried somewhere (probably in that driver) is a means to detect the size of the volume and configure the disk parameter information for it.

    Wish I had more concrete input to offer, but that stuff was written over 35 years ago and I have forgotten many of the specifics.

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  • From A2CPM@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Thu Jul 21 23:13:58 2022
    On Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 4:06:12 PM UTC-4, [email protected] wrote:
    On Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 3:14:18 AM UTC-6, A2CPM wrote:
    Ideas, anyone?
    The first question is how did you create the partitions for E: and F: to begin with?
    <--- snip --->

    Chinook SCSI Utilities. That program is capable of the physical formatting of a CF card but it's usually not needed. CSU writes what is needed by ProDOS after you specify the number of partitions and their sizes. After booting CP/AM the O/S will
    allow accessing the partitions as drives E: and F: but not properly. For example, attempting to copy a file to either drive gets an error message about insufficient directory entries. That's 'cuz, while the partition/drive can be physically read from
    or written to, a CP/M directory structure is not present. The yaze Z80 emulator package has a program for creating images of large partitions. Maybe if I play with that program I can transfer enough valid information from the yaze image to my CF card
    to allow CP/AM to play nice with it.

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