amiga 1200 crossdos problem

[skippy9963]

Can anyone please help, I am a complete newbie to amiga and I am having problems using crossdos. I have a A1200 with no hard drive and workbench 3.1. Is it possible to convert adf files to amiga disk. any help would be greatly apreciated as im completly stuck. I have tried copying pc0 to the devs/dosdrivers and it says it is mounted, but when i insert a pc formated disk in the drive it just says its a dfo:
 :-?

[HopperJF]

Load up workbench, insert the disk you want to use.
2 icons should appear, one saying DFO and another PCO.

Format the PCO: drive, if it says PC0: ?
If it doesnt, but another icon says DF0: ? then you are on the right track.

[Ilwrath]

The Amiga will try to read the disk as if it's BOTH a df0: and a PC0:

Just open a shell, and type
cd pc0:
dir

you should see the contents of the PC disk.  Of course, the A1200 can only read Low Density PC 3.5" disks.  (720K, NOT the more common 1.4M disks)

[HopperJF]

Ilwrath wrote:
The Amiga will try to read the disk as if it's BOTH a df0: and a PC0:

Just open a shell, and type
cd pc0:
dir

you should see the contents of the PC disk.  Of course, the A1200 can only read Low Density PC 3.5" disks.  (720K, NOT the more common 1.4M disks)

If you do not see the contents of the disk, type FORMAT PC0:
Then try again

[skippy9963]

I have tried all af the above method but still no joy, when in insert a formated pc disk in the drive it just comes up with 1 icon saying it is a dfo

[skippy9963]

Is there any possible way i can copy over the adf files using a null modem cable and just the software on workbench 3.1 as these are the only softare on amiga disk. Could anyone please tell me where the crossdos files are located on wb 3.1 as i can fin them any where

[Ilwrath]

Is there any possible way i can copy over the adf files using a null modem cable and just the software on workbench 3.1 as these are the only softare on amiga disk

Not easily.  Believe it, or not, there was no terminal program included in OS3.1.  :-(  Thinking about it, you might be able to pipe ser: to a file, but there would be text translation of binary data, as well as no error correction, whatsoever...  Not easy problems to overcome.

CrossDOS is really the tool you need (at least to get a terminal to the Amiga!)  How about some more information on what you're doing.

1) Are you using 3.5" DD disks (720K, NOT HD 1.4M)?

2) when you loaded the PC0: driver, did it pop any dialog boxes, requestors, or errors?

3) what happens if you open a shell and type "cd pc0:"  It's bound to say something...  What specific message does it give?

Without knowing these things, we can't really help you.  PC0 not showing on your desktop could be caused by any one of 100 or more problems...

[skippy9963]

I am using 720k disks formated using the pc. There were no error messages displayed when I copied pc0 to the dos drivers folder on my workbench disk, when I enter cd pc0: into the shell its says object not found. Also if if I try and mount pc0 again it says that pc0 is allready mounted. Also if i try and mount the drive from amigados startup screen it ask me to insert volume edf

[skippy9963]

could anyone please tell me what the crossdos handler is called and where on wb 3.1 it is

[Ilwrath]

when I enter cd pc0: into the shell its says object not found.

Ok... This is getting somewhere.  that error means that pc0: has mounted, but is unable to find/read a disk.  (In other words, there's either an error in your PC0: configuration, or the disk is unusable.)

from the shell, try the command
format drive pc0: name pcdisk

See if you're able to format a blank disk as PC format.  

Also if i try and mount the drive from amigados startup screen it ask me to insert volume edf

Yeah, there are some AmigaOS things that need to be loaded before CrossDOS is ready to be loaded, so the fact that didn't work doesn't surprise me.  Kind of an odd error message, though.  I suspect there may be an error in your config file for PC0:

Also, make sure you have the files:

L:CrossDOSFileSystem
devs:mfm.device
devs:dosdrivers/pc0

on your boot disk.

L:CrossDOSFileSystem and devs:mfm.device are binary files, and the PC0 file is a text configuration.  It's contents should look something like:

/* $VER: PC0 40.1 (31.8.93)
 */

FileSystem   = L:CrossDOSFileSystem
Device      = mfm.device
Flags      = 1
Surfaces   = 2
SectorsPerTrack   = 9
SectorSize   = 512
Reserved   = 1
Interleave   = 0
LowCyl      = 0
HighCyl      = 79
Buffers      = 5
BufMemType   = 0
StackSize   = 600
Priority   = 10
GlobVec      = -1
DosType      = 0x4D534400

/* The Unit field is controlled by tooltypes in the PC0 icon.
 *
 * Unit      = 0
 */

Stuff between the /* and */ are comments, and can be ignored.

[Ilwrath]

could anyone please tell me what the crossdos handler is called and where on wb 3.1 it is

That is the L:CrossDOSFileSystem file.

[skippy9963]

think ive finally found the problem i needed to copy the handler for cross across to the workbench disk. the file was hidden on the extras disk, and you needed to click on show all files, then there was a folder called L I think the file is called crossdos.handler or something similar

 :-D problem sorted thanks very much for that headache curing.