[sebhc] Dwight's transfer tool

[Dwight K. Elvey]

>From: "Steven Parker" <sp11 at hotmail.com>
>
>>>I checked out my bootstrap and image transfer program
>>>( H89LDR ) and it works fine. I sent a copy to Steven so
>>>hopefully he gets it post to the web soon.
>
>It's in the "utilities" section (the top-level one).
>

Hi
 I should note that the current version has only been checked
out on a H8 with ZCON8( Z80 ) and H8-4 Serial board ( as well
as H89/90 ).
 I'm currently working to include the H8 with PAM8( 8080 )
with the H8-5 Cassette/Serial board( I just got the machine
running last night ).
 It should work with a PAM8 and H8-4 but I've not checked
this out yet.
 It is also, only intended for 40 track, single sided, 10
hard sectored disk.
 The system must have an unaltered H17 ROM or XCON8 ROM. It
also needs a couple of K of good RAM starting at 040.000.
 The PC must be run in DOS without any interrupts
running on the selected serial port.
 I'll add features as needed or assist others in adding
such features.
 Any and all feedback is good.
 Make sure and actually read the README.TXT file. The sequence
for the H8 must be followed or it won't work as expected.
 It only works with image files. The ones from the web that
are of the form *.H8D and are 100K in size seem to work fine.
 For HDOS disk, leave the volume number to be selected from
the image. CP/M and other types may need other special handling.
I don't have any of these to play with so I don't know what
to expect.
 You must select a DOS file name before doing a read or write
to/from the H8. Use care here, a read from the H8 to a file
will overwrite any previous file by that name. If you intend
to do a read and you don't get a message stating that it
created a new file, you will be overwriting an existing 
PC DOS file. Of course, this same message when you intended
to write to a HDOS disk will not be good either.
 The tool formats the disk as it writes the disk image so all
that is needed is blank disks or disks that you don't care about
the data.
 When reading existing disks, make sure and put a write protect
tag on the disk. It is real easy to type a W or get confused
about who is reading and who is writing.
 If the system errors, it may hang. You may need to reboot
the PC or the H8 in such a case.
 You can save a standalone boot image of the bootstrap/loader
code so it doesn't have to be re-entered. This disk is not
an HDOS disk and unless overwriting a previously completely
formatted disk, you can not save its image with this tool.
The tool only formats/writes a small piece of track 0 when
used to save the bootstrap/loader code.
 I'm sure you'll find something I haven't mentioned, just let
me know.
 There is some debug/progess information printed at as the
program runs. This can help find problems.
 As I recall, it will read an entire disk, even if it is
corrupted ( of course the corrupted data will be garbage ).
This may be useful to recover files if the corruption is
in the data and not the directory or tables that HDOS uses.
I've not checked this feature lately so if someone wants
to try this, let me know.
 Lets see some more images recovered from disks!
Dwight


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