racsiii

Yes Virginia, there really is a hard drive

(Yes, honest, no more tricks. 😉 )

Let’s just dive in!

You might want to get a cup of coffee, this is going to take a while. And, I regret to inform you, there will be math.

When I first got the boot disk copied by Ira, it had the following pdrive information –

So for anyone that knows me, that’s just a bit weird. I have this weird thing about uniformity and never would have made disk 3 and disk 4 be different sizes, specifications, etc. This immediately triggered fright in me. Is the diskette just corrupt, or was the hard drive damaged too.

Everything you never wanted to know about NewDos/80 2.5 disks and MORE

I decided that I immediately had to understand what was up. Luckily, with trs80gp I could just load the diskette in as you see and boot it. So now I’d need access to the HD. Unfortunately, as much as it says it has support for EMU, it turns out its EMU support for only one hard drive controller, the WD1010. Since I had an OMTI-20L, I was S-O-L. 😉 Fortunately, G+P of trs80gp had a solution. If I created a DREM config file, it would work! So they needed more information about the hard drive. Fortunately, I had megadisk 1 25 1986 which had all the information. Specifically –

With that , they were able to devise a correct DREM file for me –

# DREM config file for OMTI 20L data
[DSK]
Name=TRS-80 Hard Drive
Encoding=MFM
RPM=3600
Tracks=306
Sides=6
Sectors=38
First Sector ID=0
Sector Size=256
Format=WDC
Step Signal Hold=8
Interleave=1
Data ECC=NO

I just put that in the same directory as the DSK file, give it the same beginning file name and change the end to cfg and I was done. So I did that. And I booted trs80gp. And…. “DIRECTORY READ ERROR” :-/

I worked with G+P and found out that in the version I was running, 2.5.1, there was an issue with a wrong byte at FE26 in memory. Fortunately, with the editor, I could “zap” it from its wrong value to the correct one. So I did. And I did a dir 3, and got back, well –

OUCH. 4 wasn’t much better.

Eek. No good. I was worried the system was shot, and I had gotten here and it turned out the very last thing that needed to cooperate would kill the whole project. No, seriously, really, I mean it this time. This wasn’t just for grabbing your attention. I plowed on to see just how bad it was.

Ok, ok, this is encouraging. But interestingly enough, it says its “RACSHD#1”. Given this is the 3rd partitiion, I can’t understand how it would be labeled. 3 was -1 and 4 was 0? That sounds a bit wonky. Ok, well, lets press on.

Err.. Wasn’t bad up until STARTUP/ZZZ and then it went a bit wonky until LOGIN/ZZZ. Ok, well, lets soldier on

Ok, not so bad. So of the 5 partitions, 2 were totally b0rked, 1 was a bit messed up, and 2 were reasonable.

Whats the FIRST thing you’d do?

So the first thing I did was at least try to recover the files that I could. I put modem80 on my disk drive, and ONE BY ONE transferred them over the serial port to my Mac running, of all things, Serial. Interestingly enough, it actually did XMODEM. So I immediately (not quickly at 9600 baud mind you, but immediately) downloaded all the files I could. There was only 1 file that didn’t cooperate, and that had a 0 file length anyway.

Where to start?

So now to figure out what to do about partition 3 and 4. This is when the incredible fun happened. I had to learn a whole new language. There were terms like –

  • Hit table
  • Lumps
  • Granules
  • GAT sector
  • etc

GREAT, I barely can speak English as a native, I need to understand all these things. Fortunately, the interwebs to the rescue. Between my original NewDOS/80 manual (Which was comperable to this), the TRS-80 Hackers Handbook for NewDOS80, TRSDOS 2.3 Decoded and other Mysteries (I actually know I had this book, but hadn’t seen it, and it was pretty useful, so I bought another copy to be able to thumb around) I was able to get TOTALLY AND THOROUGHLY CONFUSED! Turns out, that NewDos/80 and even V2.5 did things a bit differently than TRSDOS did, and trying to keep up with it all was dizzying. It took quite a while to get a handle on things. If you’re here wanting to learn about TRSDOS or LDOS or any others, LEAVE NOW!. I can no be responsible for your getting totally and thoroughly confused like I did.

NewDos/80 V2.5 terms and concepts crash (Not hard drive crash) course

I don’t want to bore you, but lets start off with some simple stuff.

A pdrive setting of HDS = (0,306,0,6,38,0,52326,17442,12,8,80,33)means :

0 – Hard disk drive number (hddn1). The first drive was 0, second 1, etc.

306 – Tracks per Surface / Cylinders per head (tps1). As per the page above, I had 306 cylinders

0 – Section First Surface (sfs1). This is the first heads number.

6 – Section Surface Count (ssc1). This was the number of heads there were (6 as per above)

38 – Sectors per Track (spt1). As it says, number of sectors in a “track”. The 38 may be explained later.

0 – Track Stepping Rate (tsr1). How fast a disk head can move from track to track. Not used for for HD.

52326 – Volume First Sector (vfs1). This is the first sector on the drive that constitutes the logical volume

17442 – Volume Sector Count (vsc1). This is the number of sectors that constitute the volume.

12 – Sectors per Granule (spg1). I’ll explain a granule soon.

8 – Granules per Lump (gpl2). And I’ll explain a lump soon. 😉

80 – Default directory starting lump (ddsl1) – Where the HIT and GAT are on that partition (Both will also be explained soon)

33 – Default Directory Sector Allocations (ddsa1) – How many sectors to use to store the directory.

So, what was all those terms you promised to explain?

Lets take a step back and explain some of those terms.

  • Granule – So because hard disks are much bigger than diskettes, they needed a way to try to refer to a few sectors at time for files so granule was invented. Its only really saying in my case that a gran (Shorthand for granule) is 12 sectors. You avoid math only this far.
  • Lump – Again, because the hard disks are much bigger, they needed a way to talk about what sectors were already allocated. So for me, 8 grans to a lump. And now math. 12 sectors to the gran, 8 grans to a lump means there are 96 sectors to a lump.
  • HIT Table – The hit table is a way to speed finding files. The filename is hashed, and depending on the location it goes into a specific place in the hit table. Oddly, the hash wasn’t a perfect way since duplicates could occur
  • GAT Table – This contains a bitmap of where on the disk is available, the creation date, a master password, and what to run on startup (Called AUTO)
  • File Primary Directory Entry (FPDE) – These are the directory entries. They contain all the information about the file name, location, etc.
  • File Extended Directory Entry (FXDE) – The FPDE has 4 locations to define where the file resides. If it goes past that, they put an FXDE entry to continue.
  • Default Directory – As mentioned, it was 80. This means 80 * 12 (spg1) * 8 (gpl2) which means it starts at sector 7680.

Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more

I’d probably lose everyone if I kept going past this point. There’s bit twiddles, “if then/else”, “On the 3rd Thursday of the month you need to…” that are just too much to go into. I won’t go into that, but feel free to contact me if you need any additional help.

So after all this, I went back to considering trying to figure out why disks 3 and 4 were totally scr0d. I don’t understand why I’d have 2 unequal partitions, gaps, etc. I went back to the Megadisk manual and read it over and Over and OVER. It seems that it was shipped with 4 partitions, but of course could have been changed. I took a look at the files included on the Instapatch disk. Given the disk is 306 sectors , and 15 gig, the files would have been –

% ls B30615*
B306152.JCL B306153.JCL B306154.JCL B306155.JCL B306156.JCL

Looking at them, there was only one that seemed close enough with the values. That would have been –

% strings B306154.JCL
COPY BASIC/CMD:1 :0
KILL BASIC/CMD:0
COPY SYS0/SYS:1 :0
COPY SYS17/SYS:1 :0
SYSTEM 0 AL=8,BO=6,BJ=3,BQ=1
PDRIVE 0 2=0
PDRIVE 0 3=0
PDRIVE 0 4 HDS=(0,306,0,6,38,0,0,17442,0,8,0,33)
PDRIVE 0 5 HDS=(0,306,0,6,38,0,17442,17442,0,8,0,33)
PDRIVE 0 6 HDS=(0,306,0,6,38,0,34884,17442,0,8,0,33)
PDRIVE 0 7 HDS=(0,306,0,6,38,0,52326,17442,0,8,0,33)
COPY BASIC/CMD:1 :0
AUTO BASIC RUN"START4"
BOOT

It looks like 5,6,7 were all correct, it was just 4 that wasn’t . But could I be sure that I didn’t decide to actually do something like this for a reason. So I decided to write a small python program to take all the knowledge I had and try to see if there was a way to check if/how intact things are.

I won’t go into all the things it does, and its not 100% correct all around, but it’s a great start. You can get a copy of the dirdecode.py to see what and how it does it. I ran it on disk 7, and got the following –

Read disk
Disk name is RACSHD#3 Password: e042 Dated:02/28/87 Diskautorun: 

Disk usage based on sector data

***.........************************************************************
************************************************************************
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**********************************************************************..
***.........**************..........**..........*********************...
**..........******......*...........******************************......
********************....************************************************
****************************************........*********...*...........
**..........*...........***********************************.*...........
*********...*********...******......*******.....*********...*******.....
*...........**..........***********.****************........*...........
*************...........*...........****........**..........**********..
**..........*****.......************************************************
************************************************************************
*****************.......***********************.************************
*...........***.........***.........**..........***.........**..........
***.........****........**..........**..........**..........***.........
*...........**..........***.........************************************
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Disk usage based on GAT data
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Allocations Based on HIT data
Directory Sector -  0
a2 c4 a9 9e 42 de 0a 00 
 
Directory Sector -  1
ce a4 89 1e c2 e3 0c 00 
 
Directory Sector -  2
19 a3 8b 1b 41 8b d1 00 
 
Directory Sector -  3
01 a2 89 43 c1 b0 af 00 
 
Directory Sector -  4
a8 a1 85 c3 40 66 61 00 
 
Directory Sector -  5
a7 a0 e2 c7 c0 2d 4a 00 
 
Directory Sector -  6
a6 af 32 87 47 85 83 00 
 
Directory Sector -  7
a5 ae 40 47 c7 d2 00 00 
 
 
Directory entries
Status         File        U/A Pass      E/S      L/S                           EOF
3/U/I/Y      BOOT/SYS      607f/1fb2     1/12    [ 0/12 ]                      5/0
0/*/V/N      BDNAMES/DAT   9642/9642     1/12    [ 5/12 ]                      0/71
0/*/V/N      CDCK          9642/9642     1/36    [ 6/36 ]                      34/245
0/*/V/N      CONFIG/DAT    9642/9642     1/12    [ 1/12 ]                      0/236
0/*/V/N      COSMOS3/UPL   9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      8/119
0/*/V/N      D700/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 3/12 ]                      8/61
0/*/V/N      D701/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 4/12 ]                      5/77
0/*/V/N      D702/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 5/12 ]                      6/11
5/N/I/Y      DIR/SYS       a71d/f9e5     1/36    [ 0/36 ]                      33/0
0/*/V/N      D703/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 6/12 ]                      8/199
0/*/V/N      D704/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 7/12 ]                      6/169
0/*/V/N      D705/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 0/12 ]                      0/133
0/*/V/N      D706/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 1/12 ]                      1/230
0/*/V/N      D707/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      10/126
0/*/V/N      D708/PCL      9642/9642     1/24    [ 3/24 ]                      15/242
0/*/V/N      D709/PCL      9642/9642     1/12    [ 5/12 ]                      0/251
0/*/V/N      D770/PCL      9642/9642     1/24    [ 6/24 ]                      12/1
0/*/V/N      D81/PCL       9642/9642     1/12    [ 0/12 ]                      0/58
0/*/V/N      D92/PCL       9642/9642     1/12    [ 1/12 ]                      3/26
0/*/V/N      D93/PCL       9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      1/66
0/*/V/N      D95/PCL       9642/9642     1/12    [ 3/12 ]                      9/1
0/*/V/N      DATES/DAT     9642/9642     1/12    [ 4/12 ]                      1/230
0/*/V/N      GRAPHIC/DAT   9642/9642     1/12    [ 5/12 ]                      4/24
0/*/V/N      HEADERS/DAT   9642/9642     1/144   [ 6/144 ]                     137/0
0/*/V/N      HELP0/PCL     9642/9642     1/24    [ 2/24 ]                      22/245
0/*/V/N      HELP1/PCL     9642/9642     1/24    [ 4/24 ]                      24/0
0/*/V/N      LUNSCORE/DAT  9642/9642     1/12    [ 6/12 ]                      0/207
0/*/V/N      MENU0/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 7/12 ]                      2/239
0/*/V/N      MENU1/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 0/12 ]                      2/237
0/*/V/N      MENU10/MEN    9642/9642     1/12    [ 1/12 ]                      1/33
0/*/V/N      MENU11/MEN    9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      2/101
0/*/V/N      MENU12/MEN    9642/9642     1/12    [ 3/12 ]                      1/218
0/*/V/N      MENU2/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 4/12 ]                      2/111
0/*/V/N      MENU3/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 5/12 ]                      3/30
0/*/V/N      MENU4/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 6/12 ]                      1/255
0/*/V/N      MENU5/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 7/12 ]                      1/176
0/*/V/N      MENU6/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 0/12 ]                      1/237
0/*/V/N      MENU7/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 1/12 ]                      2/219
0/*/V/N      MENU8/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      0/188
0/*/V/N      MENU9/MEN     9642/9642     1/12    [ 3/12 ]                      1/90
0/*/V/N      MESSAGE/DAT   9642/9642     2/420   [ 1/384 1/36 ]                418/0
0/*/V/N      MOVIEDAT/DAT  9642/9642     1/12    [ 4/12 ]                      2/143
0/*/V/N      PASSWORD/DAT  9642/9642     2/24    [ 5/12 4/12 ]                 14/173
0/*/V/N      PRIVMESS/PCL  9642/9642     1/12    [ 6/12 ]                      1/251
0/*/V/N      REGISTER/PCL  9642/9642     1/12    [ 7/12 ]                      1/111
0/*/V/N      RSTS/PCL      9642/9642     1/24    [ 0/24 ]                      20/150
0/*/V/N      SYSMESS/DAT   9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      1/96
0/*/V/N      TELCO/PCL     9642/9642     1/12    [ 3/12 ]                      5/145
0/*/V/N      TERMINAL/DAT  9642/9642     1/12    [ 4/12 ]                      0/186
0/*/V/N      TOPS20/UPL    9642/9642     1/36    [ 5/36 ]                      29/53
0/*/V/N      TYMNET/UPL    9642/9642     1/24    [ 0/24 ]                      19/64
0/*/V/N      USERLOG/DAT   9642/9642     1/96    [ 2/96 ]                      88/0
0/*/V/N      USERSTAT/DAT  9642/9642     1/12    [ 2/12 ]                      8/82
0/*/V/N      VOTES/DAT     9642/9642     1/12    [ 3/12 ]                      0/73
0/*/V/N      WELCOME/MSG   9642/9642     1/12    [ 4/12 ]                      1/181
0/*/V/N      LOGIN/ROC     9642/9642     1/48    [ 5/48 ]                      39/183

Explaining the different sections:

  • Disk name is RACSHD#3 Password: e042 Dated:02/28/87 Diskautorun:

Pretty much explains itself. The password is a hash.

  • Disk usage based on sector data

This isn’t perfect, but I determined that if the first 3 bytes of the sector are decimal 229 then its probably empty. A “.” means its empty, and “*” means it had other than 229 in the first 3 positions.

  • Disk usage based on GAT data

This is using the GAT table mentioned before , this is what the system thinks is used. You’ll notice a lot more “*”, and of course a lot less “.”. This is because the GAT is doing things in a larger chunk than by sector (remember grans and lumps. 😉 ). But they look pretty enough close for me to be ok.

  • Allocations Based on HIT data

This is a copy of the hash’d filename versus location.

  • Directory entries
Status         File        U/A Pass      E/S      L/S                           EOF
3/U/I/Y      BOOT/SYS      607f/1fb2     1/12    [ 0/12 ]                      5/0

Gives information about FPDE/FXDE. Statuses, file name, User/Access password, etc.

OTHER DRIVES?

So the output for the other disks are –

  • Disk 6 – FILE
  • Disk 5 – FILE
  • Disk 4 – Well, the program constantly crashes since things don’t make sense to it
  • Disk 3 – Again, constantly crashes since things don’t make sense to it

Getting back to disk 6, the bottom of that file is interesting.

0/*/V/N      USERZAP/RAC   9642/9642     1/24    [ 2/24 ]                      21/144
0/*/V/N      STARTUP/ZZZ   9642/9642     1/36    [ 7/36 ]                      27/172
0/*/V/N      LOGIN/ZZZ     9642/9642     1/48    [ 2/48 ]                      40/60
Dec 0        [ 6/384 6/384 6/384 6/384 ]
Dec 132        [ 6/384 6/384 6/384 6/384 ]
Dec 164        [ 6/384 6/384 6/384 6/384 ]
Dec 196        [ 6/384 6/384 6/384 6/384 ]
Dec 228        [ 6/24 3/384 3/384 3/384 ]

If you looked previously, there were 2 weird things between STARTUP/ZZZ or LOGIN/ZZZ. Turns out it was the Dec entries. These are FXDE’s. But they’re damaged. Ok, not totally bad. All the files seemed intact otherwise, so I decided I can go past it.

And… what about drive 4?

I decided to go back to the system and change the pdrives to what should have been expected :

PDRIVE 0 3=0
PDRIVE 0 4 HDS=(0,306,0,6,38,0,0,17442,0,8,0,33)

and………

That’s both great and terrible. GREAT that it looks like a properly formed directory, but TERRIBLE in that its empty. So I ran the dirdecode.py and got these results. Looks like its a pretty clean slate. :-/ I don’t have any records of what was on there, etc. I was hoping that maybe there was data there and that the directory just didn’t understand it, but using my own programs it didn’t turn out to be the case. So I don’t know what I lost. But given I still can do it on the trs80gp, I decided to log in and test things out.

Going through the messages, I noticed –

Well, that answers that! Seems like its in good shape! So, now its time

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About Tuc .

Tuc, owner and Sysop of RACS III started his computing adventures on an IBM 5110 with a 4 inch screen, 16K Basic, 2 8" floppy drives and a 132 column dot matrix printer in 1978. After retiring for a bit to Tucs Beachin OBX House in NC, he came back and is now the Senior Site Reliability Engineering Manager for a global SAAS company.
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