Hello forum members!
I'm the proud new owner of an EIII 8MB keyboard. The EIII was in pretty good shape overall, however the LCD was non-functional (dim but working backlight, no display at all), the Floppy doesn't work and the HD is on its last legs. It came with OS 2.40, but part of the OS resides on bad sectors on the HD, so I couldn't get to the Digital Processing module for example.
I dreaded the thought of trying to install XP on an old PC with a floppy, but begrudgingly I carted the old Dell up from the garage and powered it up. I'm not a Windows guy. I'm a UNIX guy, who happens to have a bunch of Macs at home. While I am truly grateful for everything that esynthesist has done (I still have my original Emax which I bought new in 1987), I really didn't want to have to go through all that just to have an OS disk. My trusty old PC still has FreeBSD 4.7 installed on it, so I thought I'd see if I could use UNIX to make myself a boot floppy.
I downloaded the OS 2.42 image (EIIIOS242.zip), unzipped the file on my Mac, which created EIIIOS242.img. Noticing that this file is _exactly_ 800Mbytes in size, I was hopeful I could just "dd" the file to the 800M floppy device. So I copied this file to my FreeBSD host, formatted the (DS) floppy, and used the "swiss-army-knife" of UNIX utilities, "dd" to copy the .IMG file over to the floppy.
This will work just as well with Linux. I just happen to prefer FreeBSD
Here are the steps:
- Format a blank floppy: fdformat /dev/fd0.800
- Copy the image file to floppy: dd if=/path/to/file/EIIIOS242.img of=/dev/fd0.800 bs=512
- Wait for the dd to finish (takes a while), floppy drive light to go off, eject disk and you're done!
To use Linux instead of FreeBSD, you should only have to replace
/dev/fd0.800 with
/dev/fd0u800.
Hopefully this information is useful to someone else besides me.
-Dave
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