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[Trlog] More on using TRlog on a WinXP machine with a thumb USBdrive

To: <Trlog@contesting.com>
Subject: [Trlog] More on using TRlog on a WinXP machine with a thumb USBdrive
From: "Tom Whiteside" <tomw@ecpi.com>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:02:54 -0600
List-post: <mailto:trlog@contesting.com>
Sunday I posted success in an actual contest using TRlog on an XP machine using 
a boot diskette and a USB Flash (thumb) drive.    I have done a bunch of 
running TR using the debug simulator but nothing like a real contest to fully 
engage Murphy.

Mark, KD4D suggested I write a bit more so folks can see just how simple this 
process was.    He also suggested posting this on the Contest reflector - I'm 
not a subcriber so perhaps someone can forward if you think this is helpful.

OVERVIEW:  The concept is very simple - TR and XP are basically incompatible 
and the NTFS file system that new XP computers are built on are also 
incompatible with DOS.    One solution is adding an appropriate disk partition 
and using a dual boot arrangement as KD4D has thoroughly documented.    This is 
probably the best approach but my goal was to do this on a stock computer 
without changing anything.

Here is all I have to do:   Boot the computer under XP and plug in the thumb 
drive which has TR and my contest stuff on it.   Insert a DOS floppy and do a 
restart boot with the right autoexec, etc and voila - I am running TR on the 
Thumb drive.   Some computers support booting from the USB device but mine does 
not allow that.   KD4D has documented an approach for booting from a CD but my 
machine has a floppy and I just boot off of that.   What could be more simple?

Here are more details on what I did:

Setting up the thumb drive:
    Simple - these already use a FAT file format for compatibility - just 
created a TR directory and put my TR data in there.    This drive is seen as 
the "C" drive on boot.  Mine is a 512MB drive - this process probably won't 
work on one bigger than 2GB.

Setting up the floppy diskette:
    I used a Win98 machine to format a diskette by right clicking the A: drive 
and choosing to format the diskette with system files - you need that to allow 
it to boot.
Next, I copied the following DOS commands from the Win98 system to the diskette:

    EDIT.COM
    EMM386.EXE
    HIMEM.SYS
    MEM.EXE
    MORE.COM
    SMARTDRV.EXE

There may be other DOS commands you find you need and you can copy them onto 
the floppy as needed.   I located them using the Windows Explorer file search 
facility.

The AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files needed are very vanilla.   The 
AUTOEXEC.BAT file is:

lh smartdrv.exe  C+ 16384 2048 
path=c:\tr;a:
c:
cd tr
tr
smartdrv.exe /c

A couple of comments - the USB thumb drives are painfully slow without using 
SMARTDRV.   Notice that I made the disk cache huge by DOS standards but no 
sweat for a modern computer.   The SMARTDRV.EXE /c last line is to insure that 
any latent cache writebacks get handled when the autoexec completes.   You 
could use a RAM disk to minimize writes to the drive but that seems like a good 
way to lose a contest to me....

Here is the CONFIG.SYS file:

DOS=HIGH,UMB
lastdrive=D
device=HIMEM.SYS
device=emm386.exe noems

Nothing exciting here.

I had to do absolutely nothing unusual in the TR cfg file - all works just like 
normal.  I'm keying a DX Doubler with a parallel port and have a Ten Tec Orion 
on one of the native serial ports.    My Dell XPS computer has two serial ports 
and I can use the second one as a multiport or to feed packet spots from 
another computer using DXTelnet.    W5TA was doing a single op this weekend so 
packet was not being used but my testing has been with packet and TR simulator 
in debug mode.

What allows this to work in a modern computer is that the thumb drives are 
recognized and managed at the BIOS level.   I don't know why I have to run XP 
to get the drive going rather than a cold boot to DOS but I do.    

The bottom line is that this is EASY and it seems to work flawlessly here.   
Give it a try!   (Thanks to N4ZR for his NCJ blurb on doing this and to ND4D 
for his coaching in forgotten DOS lore and other encouragement.)

Tom Whiteside N5TW
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