PC-DOS 7.x

edited July 2019 in Product Comments

PC-DOS 7.x

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  • I cannot speak for the other language versions, but, with the first archive, showing the English set, It is possible to install this in a VMWare virtual machine.

    The archiver of this set used the "savedskf" command to save an image of disk 1. The problem is that savedskf compresses the image and adds some information to the beginning of the file. The disk can be stored byte-for-byte, without compression, by using savedskf with the /a and /d option. Although the remaining disks are in xdf format, they were stored with the "xdfcopy" command, and this saved all the data correctly. VMWare Player 15 (and probably some earlier versions) had no trouble showing the various "bundles" containing the DOS files. Setup didn't complain and everything was unpacked and set up correctly, once disk 1 had been converted into a byte-for-byte copy.

    I saved my copy of PC DOS 7.0 in the same way I mentioned above and I was also able to set it up with VMWare Player successfully. I had no idea it would work, but, it did.

    Even though it will read those xdf disks as straight images, VMWare Player cannot create xdf images.

    Hope this is useful.

  • xdfcopy, which comes with PC-DOS, can save and restore XDF-formatted diskettes.

    The disk images prepared with savedskf /d /a are raw images, such as you save with programs like dskimage/diskmage, or rawrite/rawread. The first proggie that I saw that recriprocated savedskf was makedskf, an OS/2 thing.

    The bundles can be seen with unpack2 /show. IBM had a program dsk2cd which copied the diskette files to a cd so you can run setup from that.

    The sgtk files are a sampler of the DOS 7.1 distro, The consensus is to use the 119 kernel and the 132 stuff elsewise. I'm thinking of using the 132 kernel on the cdrom, because it will time-out to the fixed disk.
  • Does anyone have any idea if it is possible to convert the XDF (1840) format floppies into 1.44 floppies. As was mentioned above, they failed to load in DOSBOX. I do have a real 1.44 floppy drive and disks, but it seems you might need the real XDF floppies to convert. Any thoughts or ideas would appreciated, even if there is nothing that can be down without the real XDF floppies.
    Thanks
  • You can't convert them to 1.44mb image format because they contain more than 1.44mb of data.

    IBM distributed these disks with this oddball proprietary format, and almost nothing supports them.

    To create disks, you must use a real computer with a real floppy controller (not USB).

    Now that I think of it, I wonder if the contents could be copied to 2.88mb disk images. Not all emulators support 2.88mb images, but some do.
  • To create disks, you must use a real computer with a real floppy controller (not USB)


    It can be also done on an emulator that supports this format. I.e. 86box/VARCem recognize mounted XDF images in 3.5" 1.44M or 2.88M floppy drives. They also can write XDF files using XDFCOPY utility to 86f images and allow to use those to install/read/copy etc.
  • Well I played around a bit, and was able to place them onto six 1.44 disk images, which I then copied to real 1.44 floppies. Although I am sure it is not exactly the same thing as using xdfcopy, I was able to do a full install with no errors using real floppies and a real old computer.
  • Dosbox is able to read the 2.88, still have to play around with xdfcopy and make.bat to try to get things to work. says the source and destination drives have to be different.
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