Partner Mail R1 Hard Drive Problem

[phxx]

I have several 1.0 versions and they seem to have a lot of booting up problmes. The version 3's do not seem to have this problem.

Do you have any of these problmes with the lower versions? Also I have a few drives that have taken a dive. The box and voice cards are ok but the drives are dead. I would like to bring these back into service.

Any suggestions on replacing these with a copy of version 3? If so what drive can I use and how do I copy it to the drive. I believe they are working on DOS.

 

[skip555]

not worth it , it's like trying to keep a xt PC alive

why bother ?

 

[dagwoodsystems]

The old hang-on-the-wall Partner voicemail systems use an operating system called Concurrent DOS, which is one of many manifestations of Gary Kildall's CP/M (specifically, CPM-86 from Digital Research where Gary worked) that was designed to run on 8-bit systems. IBM totally ripped it off and called it DOS. Bill Gates received a license from IBM, tweaked it and called it MicroSoft DOS (it was a capital "S" in "Soft" back then) or simply MS-DOS. You know the rest of the story.

You'll find that there are two partitions, the second being the more familiar FAT type DOS partition. If you're at all PC saavy, you'll be able to figure out pretty quickly what does what.

There is an audit and recovery utility in the O/S. It does some reindexing (IDX) of the MSG (message database) files and the like, but nothing heavy duty. These utilities run each time the box starts up, so any boot problems you now have will likely be related to the aging physical drive itself.

Given that, I'd say that your time would be better spent reading

http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Cpm/

than it would trying to fix these old voicemails.

But if you're a 42-year old hack like me, use a search engine and you'll quickly find Windows utilities which will allow you to boot a Concurrent-DOS or CP/M formatted drive as an IDE slave on your home PC. You can then pull all of AT&T/Lucent's jewels for safekeeping, format a new drive and slide the jewels back on.

Drill down on the link above and you'll find format utilities that can recreate the Con-DOS C: drive partition (which will have a "partition type" byte of "DB" as opposed to the familiar "6h).

Just like the old 007MLM Merlin Mail, begin studying the drive's condition by attaching a M-F DB9 straight-through cable to the unit. Hit <CNTL>+C during boot and type "user 1" (without the quotes) at the "1C>" prompt. Any file with the CMD extension is an executable.

That should get you started. I'll meet you back at Arkham Asylum in a few minutes...

 

[phxx]

Thanks. I like soloutions insdead of just crap it it is to old. These old boxes just need a new drive.

I did slap it on my PC and I found the drive and it was marked MiniDOS.

I had hoped that I could just copy the entire data base which is not much since there are no messages on it and then plug in another new drive and load it but it would not boot up.

Perhaps it is in the formatting. The new drive I used was formatted using WIN2000.

 

[phxx]

BTW. Does anyone know were the battery for the Spirit control unit is located on the mother board?

 

[dagwoodsystems]

I don't have an answer on the Spirit CPU. I suggest you open another thread to get the attention you need. By the way, anyone else besides phxx who has read this far has my vote for President.

That whole miniDOS thing is curious. Is that the name of the drive? Type VER from the command promt and see what the O/S version is.

Anyway, I'm glad you felt that my input was useful. I wanna post a couple more links before I sign off this thread:

1) Mike's Virtual Computer Museum,

http://www3.nbnet.nb.ca/mclays/newdos80.html

is just plain cool.

2) Old Atari developer's notes (which also ran on CP/M and miniDOS II) can be found at

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/ATARI/ST/FORESIGHT/fs.txt.

Section 3.5 has details about the command line.

3) You can follow the evolution of GEM, an open-source GUI that (at one time) looked like a Windows contender. It's a graphical interface that sits on top of DOS. MiniDOS has a 64k exe limitation, but they are trying to make GEM run on top of it anyway,

http://gem.shaneland.co.uk/index.html

4) Check out

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/hardware/feat44.html

to prove to yourself that you're not alone.

Welcome to Club Weirdo; where social ineptitude is a "Don't Care" because Engineering is king.