Olivetti M15 CP/M

[wgoodf]

Ok then - hello!

I have my Olivetti M15 running CP/M IBM compatible 1.1 - which is good and dandy.

However i cant get any actual software on to the thing. i have tried disk22, but with so many disk options to choose from its kinda hard. I have tried the olivetti and ibm definitions and also tried any that specify 3.5" disks. nowhere so far.

the olivetti has two 720k drives - i am making the floppies on an old PII laptop running XP.
if i format a disk in the olivetti using the running cp/m system, the disk is usable in that machine only - everywhere else its not recognized as being formatted, or from WinImage view, it does not actually exist - so i can't stick files on it that way.
DOS disks are not readable in the olivetti running cp/m - well actually a dos disk created in MacOS 7.5 is readable, but its garbage.

so there i am. disk22 i read is the way to go, but i cant actually get it to either format a disk, as the disk definitions complain of hard sector errors when trying on the XP machine - or if they do format, the olivetti cp/m cant use them.

any ideas?

[Terry Yager]

Just a suggestion, have you tried direct connection thru serial ports?

--T

[wgoodf]

no cables handy for such a thing. - nice idea tho'

i notice that the sticky link to this cp/m board has links to software that i have not tried -namely imagedisk which might do something good. or at least allow some manipulation of some sort providing i can find some images of use.

tell me - a cp/m disk image for one machine, should be at least readable on an other?
mostly anyway?

[ahm]

First, you keep calling this "CP/M", which is generally understood to mean CP/M-80 (for 8080 and Z80 processors).
However, your machine has an 8088 processor, so the operating system is more likely to be some variant of CP/M-86.
The significance is that there's probably less software available for CP/M-86 than for CP/M-80.

a cp/m disk image for one machine, should be at least readable on an other?

No, which is why we have programs such as 22DISK.
There's lots of disk formats, generally incompatible.

You may need to create your own disk definition for 22DISK.
Perhaps you'd be able to discover something about the disk format with a program like ANADISK,
although I'm not sure it would run on XP. You might need real DOS.

Cheers,
Andy

[wgoodf]

thanks for the reply to my obviously newbie questions.
i will give anadisk a try, so thanks for the pointer.

regards