Re: PC Transporter

[Anthony Politz <ajpolitz@bellatlantic.net>]

Anyone know what a PCT is worth theses days ? I have one still in the box
never used and was just wondering.

    Ajpolitz

"Michael Y. Su" wrote:

> 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.  :*!