DOS based CD-Writer software ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

The CD drive wont 'show up' unless it has a disk in it.

Since Mint normally boots to install from CD, the drivers will be there.

The default disk burner is brasero which may well be on the default installation.

Xfburn is a nice slimoline app too

is how to make a custom bootable live CD.

But why not install Mint and dual boot the PC anyway?

[Johnny B Good]

I think I might have a couple of ST-506 cards still stashed away somewhere and I'm almost certain I've still got the ESDI adapter that was in a 2nd hand NEC PowerMate II box (along with a 16MB ISA memory expansion adapter) which had Novell NetWare 3.11 installed on it.

The 300MB full height ESDI drive along with a 2nd similar sized (physical and capacity) drive added a few months later, both got junked as soon as I started my endless round of disk upgrades using ever larger capacity IDE drives over the next decade before I ditched Netware altogether for a Linux based solution before discovering the joy of FreeNAS which, for trademark reasons, became renamed "NAS4Free".

I've now downgraded the peak capacity of 17TB to a 'mere' 14TB a couple of months ago after finally completing an almost two year transcoding from mpg to mkv project to recover disk space which had allowed me to pull the ageing 3TB Hitachi Cool Spin 'tiddler' out the JBOD array of 4 seperate disk volumes leaving me with just one 6TB and and a couple of

4TB drives in the box with over 1.5TB of spare disk space, saving me some 3 or 4 watts of consumption. The box and the BackUPS500 energy consumption now hovers either side of the 50W mark (I don't spin the disks down to save power, preferring instead to avoid unnecessary additional stress on both drives and my sanity).

I estimate I've got about another 12 months or so before I'm obliged to replace one of the 4TB drives with an 8 or 10 TB drive. Hopefully, 8TB will become the new 'sweet spot' price point by then with 10TB not too far behind. It's all a far cry from those days when I used to wonder how the hell I was going to make use of that vast 600MB's worth of disk storage space. :-)

[Andrew Mawson]

Johnny,

A/ The original Viglen is fully functional but mechanically a write off

B/ The Viglen runs DOS 6.2 and has a floppy drive and HDD and two serial ports

C/ One serial port is for an operators panel, the other is for the machine CC controller

D/ I took an MSBACKUP of the VIGLEN HDD under DOS6.2 on 13 floppies

E/ The COMPAC DC7600 SFF was running Windows 7 and has floppy, SATA HDD and CD/DVD writer, one serial port and a network 10/100 port and 4 Gb RAM

F/ I Repartitioned and formatted its HDD and loaded DOS 6.22 from the three original Microsoft disks

G/ I copied the full DOS 6.2 MSBACKUP suite to a folder on the DC7600

H/ I ran DOS 6.2 MSBACKUP under DOS 6.22 and restored all the VIGLEN files to the DC7600 EXCEPT the DOS folder

I/ (You need to know the MSBACKUP 6.22 cannot read MSBACKUP 6.2 floppies)

J/ At this stage I had a fully functional DC7600 running DOS 6.22 and the original controller software from the VIGLEN (except it only had one serial port)

K/ Being an SFF I needed a small form factor PCI serial card - the only one I could source with DOS drivers was a StarTech PEX2S5521P

L/ The machine now has three serial ports and I just need to configure the IRQ to match the original

M/ I sourced some DOS drivers for the CR/DVD which allowed me to read but not write CDs

N/ This is when I posted asking for assistance for DOS software to WRITE CDs so that the machine files can easily be transferred in future

O/ I have (Thanks to TIM) loaded a USB stick with Linux MINT and K3B CD software allowing me not only to boot up MINT and generate CD's but also connect to my network and transfer files that way !!!

P/ The only oddity left is that the CDs generated read properly under MINT in the DC7600 and also und WIN7 on another machine but under DOS 6.22 in the DC7600 are rather flaky and rarely read ok.

Q/ I am assuming this is due to the DOS drivers I'm using (can't name them at the moment as I'm on a different PC)

Thank you all for your assistance but I do feel that some are digging deeper than required - all I was asking was to be able to write CDs under DOS 6.22 so perhaps someone may have know of a DOS application to do this Andrew

[Martin Brown]

The only ones I know of were DOS SCSI CDRW drivers - no support for anything else. Back then writing your own CDs was quite esoteric.

There may be a UDF shim for DOS that will help it cope with Mint written CDs a little better. Long time since I did anything on DOS 6.x

[The Natural Philosopher]

DOS predates DVD. And nearly predates CD.

Dos 6.22 was released in June 1994

CDs had been around, as music, and the impetus for PCS was really just to read them and play them - at that tiome a writable drive was more exopensive than te computer, so we didnt see CD-R technology until mid

1990s and later.

Dvds made little sense until computers fast enough to play video emerged, and then subsequently read-write optical drives came along but that was a few years later.

My point?

No one can be bothered to port DVD writing software to DOS 6.22

There is no need for it. DVDs are (as I discovered) a useless way to back stuff up anyway, and even worse as a data transfer mechanism when you have a network.

The only time I burn a DVD these days is to make a bootable linux image

Even making watchable videos is pointless when they are all on my server anyway.

No point in burning CDs for the car CD player as everyone uses MP3...

So the correct solution to this problem is not DOS CD software, its getting the CNC machine to run in a DOS virtual machine that can access the serial ports correctly and has access to the host file sussyem and host networking capabilities, and CD burning facilities IF you must.

[Johnny B Good]

Is the Viglen so proprietary that it isn't possible to transplant the motherboard and other component parts into an industry standard ATX case?

Ok then, so no special proprietary adapters required then. Just a bog standard ATX desktop PC then.

As I've already said, "Ouch!"

So still relatively vintage hardware then. Mind you, this looks a higher/ later spec than the one I had googled (which claimed winXP as the OEM installed OS). Does the FDD use an actual Shugart 34 pin interface on the MoBo or is is simply a USB version connected to one of the internal USB headers?

Ok, so no different to the process of installing it into a Virtual Machine then. :-)

Ah! The utter simplicity of "installing" a basic dos app. :-)

So far, so good.

This was par for the course with Microsoft. :-(

In the I/O shield but there's probably a second com port header on the MoBo waiting for a DB9 or DB25 connector to be plugged in. If not, then you'll need a PCI serial port adapter card, assuming there is a spare PCI slot - the specs page I was looking at neglected to mention this. :-(

Before spending the dosh, just make sure that there really isn't a second serial port option header on the MoBo - see above.

Ah, too late then for my fine advice above. :-(

AFAICR, there were only two IRQ options for the serial ports. You may have to share an IRQ line with between the third port and one of the first two ports.

FSVO "easily". Unless you're playing ultra-safe by deliberately not networking any of your computers, a network file sharing solution geberally represents a FLVO "easier" kind of solution than flinging CDs around the premises.

You do realise that if you *installed* Linux Mint[1], you could install Oracle's VirtualBox and set up a DOS virtual machine into which you could install MSDOS 6.22 from those dos install disks seeing as how you've got an actual floppy disk drive to insert them into. :-)

That could be for any number of reasons so I won't attempt to second guess what the issue is or where the problem lies.

Seems unlikely since, if this was the case, one could expect a more consistent failure mode than mere 'flakiness' which suggests a problem with the CD/DVD rom drive which might be compatibility issues with the recordable media or else laser calibration issues or similar.

I'm afraid my last adventures with MSDOS 6.22 were over two decades ago now and my memories of the nitty gritty details of this sort of fettling are now rather faded. Perhaps if I'd felt nostalgic enough to create a DOS VM to experiment with DOS 6.22, I might have been able to offer better advice than just vague hints but I'm afraid I can't, other than to suggest you try posting to uk.comp.homebuilt where you may find more expertise from those with sharper recollections than mine (possibly even fresh memories if any "Retro Computing" enthusiasts have been recently experimenting with virtualised instances of DOS to 're-live the DOS experience' of their youth).

[1] If you want to try installing VirtualBox, it doesn't have to be a Linux host OS, You can install it on a windows machine (and win7 is probably the optimum choice for this) and experiment with a DOS 6.22 virtual machine guest which can be copied to almost any other PC running VirtualBox. You said you had a few of these SFF machines to hand, so why not set another one up as a test bed and give it a go?

As I mentioned earlier, Virtualisation was more or less invented to solve the very problem you're trying to tackle. Unless there's some compelling need/advantage to sneakernet the data around via the medium of CDROMs, it seems a little churlish to say the least to ignore what may possibly prove to be the easiest and most flexible solution.

At least, if you do set up another machine to experiment with virtualisation, there's nothing to stop you continuing with your current quest to get the existing SFF DOS box writing to CD-R media. That way if/ when you reach an impasse with one project, you can turn to the other until you succeed or else get fed up by hitting another dead end by which time, the respite from the first may have provided a new insight to its problem. It's surprising how such breaks can make something suddenly click in your mind to reveal a sought after solution.

[Bob Eager]

I know this is now sorted, but for the record...be careful of the pinout on that header. There are two different, incompatible, conventions!

[Andrew Mawson]

Johnny,

Frustratingly the DC7600 / SFF manual refers to an option cable to add a second serial port, which looks to be just a 9 pin D type and bracket to a 'dual row of pins' header socket. These are available on eBay but cost as much as my serial port card and search as I may THERE IS NO CORRESPONDING HEADER on the mother board - believe me I've searched several SFF m/bs. - I suspect it applies to the desktop version of the DC7600 and the manual is wrong !!!

[Bob Eager]

And there are two different incimpatible pinouts anyway. I have always made my own.

[T i m]

And where the good old RS232 / V.24 breakout box can come in handy (assuming there is something to plug it into on the mobo of course). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Johnny B Good]

Yes indeed, there were! As I recall, the 10 pin header (one pin missing to act as a key) were wired one way to correspond the DB9M pin numbering which required the ribbon cable to be soldered to the pins on the DB9M or DB25M socket and the other, seemingly random pinout was to cater for a DB9M using an IDC connnection to the ribbon cable. I'm not sure but I think the signal ground return pin location in the header provided the clue as to which pinout scheme had been used on the MoBo or adapter.

I'd expect the later MoBos to use the seemingly random pinout scheme designed to cater for the cheaper to manufacture DB9M IDC connected sockets. Despite this all being ancient history now, I've still got an ice cream tub's worth of assorted serial/parallel port backplate kits of both types including loose DB9M and DB25M serial port adapters and some DB25F printer port adapters. Unless I get a sudden urge to get into retro computing (I think I have everything I need to resurrect the whole zoo from 80286 technology onwards), I doubt I'll find a use for any of them any time soon. I'm keeping them as a memento to my misspent youth.

[Johnny B Good]

That's not his current problem since there doesn't appear to be such a dual row header, as described in the MoBo manual, for him to plug one into anyway. His only option is to fit the PCI serial I/O card (he can disable the on-board serial port if needs be).

With regard to the two different pinout standards, I've already covered the reason for the two standards in another post elsewhere in this thread.

[Johnny B Good]

===snip long treatise largely extolling the virtues of virtualisation===

If you've got a PCI serial port adapter you can install, doesn't that make this issue rather academic? I realise it'll prevent you from running both projects simultaneously without having to swap the card between a VM test machine and the one you're currently trying to get the CD writer to work on but, apart from that, is the lack of an on-board com port header really such a show stopper?

BTW, although it appears to be academic now, you need to be aware that these com port headers were wired in one of two pinout standards so you'd need to be sure to select the right one or else order one of each type (a shoot first, ask questions later approach).

[Bob Eager]

Yes, I was also mentioning this.

I have always made my own cables. It's a pain doing the wiring for the 'solder' wire order when you are using IDC, but I have done it on a number of occasions.

[Bob Eager]

Yes, but 5 hours after I posted that! No problem.