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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