Re: PC Transporter

["Michael Y. Su" <msu76@bellatlantic.net>]

Thanks for all the tips!  I just got it working.

It was a combination of things.  Will Smith told me to make sure that 3.5"
should be first in the chain if I want to boot from it.  So, I reconnected
the drives accordingly.  I set the 3.5 jumper to 0 and the 5.25 jumper to 1.
Unfortunately that didn't fix things.  Instead of trying to hardwire the A/B
through the jumpers, I just set them to see 5.25 A and 3.5 B; I decided that
I would swap the 3.5 to A through the PCT control panel.

After making the adjustments in the control panel, it still wasn't working!
It kept giving me that "disk i/o" error.  But with a little serendipity, I
found out what the problem was...

I thought maybe my floppy was bad (720k's are pretty much fossils these
days).  Earlier, I had formatted it to 720k on my PC and "sys"-ed it to make
it bootable.  Just to make sure that the drive was not screwed, I put in a
random disk in, and instead of giving me the Disk I/O error, it gave me the
friendly/familiar non-system disk error.  Then for my next experiment, I
went back to my "boot disk", deleted all the system files, and put it in to
see what would happen.  This time, I didn't get the disk i/o error!  By now,
I figured it out: it wasn't the drives, nor the disks.  It was the O/S on my
"boot disk".

I had made the disk bootable through DOS under Win98.  There must have been
some new babble in msdos.sys, io.sys, and drvspace.bin that PCT and
Transdrive(s) just didn't like.  What I ended up doing was scouring the
entire collective (Mom's house, Uncle Bob's, etc.) crypts of MS-DOS
softwares for a copy of MS-DOS 3x--just some old bones MS-DOS to at least
get PCT to the A:\> prompt.

I ended up finding some OEM MS-DOS 6.2.  I was skeptical... MS-DOS 6.2 is
just a hair away from 7.0 (aka the DOS under Win95) which was just another
hair away from whatever DOS was powering Win98.  Who knows what kind of mojo
happened between 3.x and 6.2?  On top of that, it was 1.44M and the
Transdrive is a 720k.  Ugh.  A little floppy juggling was in order...

Well, I booted my PC to MS-DOS 6.2, reformatted the 720k, and re-sys-ed it
again.  And... it finally worked.  This new boot disk actually did boot my
PCT properly.

And that's the end of it.  I set up an MSDOSVOL on my HD and was back in
business... 8086 on the GS.

The only reason I was going through all this was because I needed to move
some SHK files from the net onto my GS.  All those files were downloaded to
my PC, and the PCT was to be the bridge.  I could've skipped all the
heartache and went with a null modem, but I didn't feel like buying one.
Even if I had a null modem, or any modem for that matter, I still didn't
have any term program to drive it.  And I didn't have the patience to wait
for someone to hand me some term software so that I could use the modem that
I -didn't- have.

Now, if there was only some miraculous way I could speed up the transfer.exe
utility.  It's god-awfully-slow.  Everything in PCT is ssllooww.  And the
720k floppy swapping is getting on nerves too.  :*!