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[UK] Can anyone read and image 8" disks?

A

acollins22

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 12, 2007
Messages
257
Location
Leicester, UK
Hi,

I have an old Telefunken machine I'm trying to get running. It has a pair of 8" floppy drives and I have some original media.

When I power up the machine it selects the disk drive for a few seconds but doesn't get any further. Is far as I can find out, it only has 256 bytes of ROM and so doesn't have room for "Disk bad" type messages. So this leaves me with the problem that I don't know if the machine is dodgy or the disks has lost their mojo.

Is there anyone in the UK who would be willing to have a look a disk for me and image it or even copy it please. That way I can see the route I need to travel.


All the best and thanks,

Andy.
 
It sounds like that 256bytes of rom is a "bootstrap loader" that loads the operating system from a floppy disk and the disk you are trying to read does not have the operating system on it, so you need to find the system disk(s) for that machine.
Do you know what operating system your machine needs?
If it is CP/M you could find a lot of help here and from other CP/M related sites.
 
Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'm sure you are right about the boot loader, you can't do much more in 256 bytes!

The disk I am hoping to boot from if labelled with the O/S, but this is HDOS-80 and not CP/M-80. As there is only one disk labelled as O/S I don't know how trustworthy it is, hence my original post.

Life would be more straightforward if it was CP/M but if it was too easy everyone would be doing it :)


Cheers,

Andy.
 
Can you tell us the make and model of your computer?
I did a search for HDOS-80 and the only think that came up was "Heathkit disk operating system".
More information might help.:cool:
 
Hi Folks,

The machine is a Telefunken Telecomp 5200, which is a badged Ontel OP-1. The disks are soft sectored and I too think it's Heathkit DOS as I believe that they licensed it to others.

If I could prove it could be read things would get easier.

Interesting times ahead.


Andy.
 
acollins22 said:
Hi Folks,

The machine is a Telefunken Telecomp 5200, which is a badged Ontel OP-1. The disks are soft sectored and I too think it's Heathkit DOS as I believe that they licensed it to others.

If I could prove it could be read things would get easier.

Interesting times ahead.


Andy.
Click to expand...

reviving a dead thread

it turns out I have manuals and hard-sectored diskettes for MDOS. HDOS was the hard-disk version of the OS
they had different floppy controllers that could support hard-sectored single and double-density, and IBM 3740 single density

from the hardware description, it has three different processors inside, CPU, IO Control and Video control, so there should
be a bunch of proms in it

it would be nice to get pictures of the boards and firmware dumps.

I'm hoping to get the hardware and diagnostic manuals uploaded to bitsavers soon. Dealing with the hard-sectored floppies
will be more difficult
 
Hello Al,

This is a blast from the past.

I reached a dead end with this machine and so I passed it on to a computer museum to add to their collection.


Cheers,

Andy.
 
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