Reading PC-MOS disc on a modern machine?

[stuartsez]

Hi - I'm hoping somebody here can point me in the right direction. I'm upgrading from an PC-MOS based POS to a modern Windows based one. I've done some googling, but haven't found an answer yet - is there *any* way to read a PC-MOS floppy on a modern machine? Some sort of emulator for Windows? Or even a disc utility that would get the raw text off it? Or do any of you have a machine that can convert, and I'll pay you?

Thanks,

Stuart

[SwedaGuy]

Any DOS machine should be able to read that disk, and a lot of Win systems, too. I assume you're looking at a 5.25" floppy. Is it a 360K or 1.2M disk? The 360s have a hub ring, so you can tell.

Are you trying to extract executables or just data files? PC-MOS was basically an enhanced, multi-user DOS...anything you could run on DOS could be run under PC-MOS, and most often the opposite was true as well.

[stuartsez]

Sorry - I should have been more specific. No, I'm looking at a standard 3.5" floppy. They have to be formatted before they work in the PC-MOS machine, and after that my Win machine refuses to read them.

[SwedaGuy]

I can't say I've ever encountered that problem. I have a hunch it may be a hardware thing. Even in the 3.5" floppy realm, there are two different common capacities used in PCs, the older 720K format and the newer 1.44M style. My guess is that the drive in your new machine isn't capable of reading the 720K format. Not all of the new drives are backward compatible.

On the other hand, the drive may like the disk well enough, but Windows doesn't accomodate the format. I don't use Win for anything important, so I don't really know the ins and outs of their floppy support.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I'm going to boot one of my PC-Mos machines over the long weekend and see if my Win box will read the formatted floppy.

[kb2syd]

Another thing to try...
If the MOS machine expects a 720k disk, that will be all it looks for. There is a "high density" hole in the corner of modern 3.5" HD floppy disks. Try covering that hole with an opaque piece of tape and see if your new machine can read one that was recently used in the MOS machine. The hole that needs to be covered is the one WITHOUT a plastic slide piece.

[SwedaGuy]

Mos should recognize a 1.4M disk on its own. There is a switch (/7) that will force it to format a 1.4M as a 720K, but without switches, it will just format a standard 1.44M.

[JohnElliott]

Unless something very funny's going on, anadisk under DOS on the PC should be able to read raw sectors.

[Sharkonwheels]

Well, my $.02, as Swedaguy has pointed out, MOS disks, are simply FAT formatted floppies - nothing special at all. I can read a 1.44MB PC-MOS floppy (made a bootable 5.01 UP6 install on 1.44) on my Dell Latitude D610, with the USB/hot-swap floppy, running XP SP2, without issue, and can also WinImage it in and out.

T

[SwedaGuy]

Hello there, shark!

I hoped you would chime in, I was starting to get that sinking feeling when you know you've overlooked something obvious. But, I pulled out a couple of the MOS install disks and OS/2 can read them, anyway.

[Sharkonwheels]

They're just standard, FAT (Fat16, techincally, right?) format disks, nothing special at all, except the WAY it boots. It;s a li'l different than standard DOS, but that does not affect it's format, or readability.

Heck - a MAC with a floppy that can read MS-DOS disks, can read PC-MOS disks! I used to with a PM6360!

T