Crashed

I'm having to restrain Mrs Crashed from putting the decorations up... 🫣

Special shout-out to those of us who couldn't give two squits about halloween.

Here's a picture of a ladybird instead.

PS - Proud to be a grumpy old man.

The most annoying thing I find as I get older, is being on a train and someone is bashing away at their laptop as if they were defusing a nuclear crisis. If you didn't finish it before 5 then it can wait till tomorrow. Switch off FFS and give everyone else (i.e. me) some peace on the journey home.

The Torch unix install script is very primitive.

There's no media checking, it extracts the floppy contents to the hard disk and doesn't check what disk. Once it's copied, it just sits and waits for the next one but does not check which disk it is.

So I think I'm stuck doing it the long way. 🫣

A screenshot of a Linux terminal showing the listing of a set of files from one of the Torch Unix disks.

A screenshot of a Linux terminal showing the text of a file used to format a Torch floppy disk.

So, I managed to work out how to use cpio without destroying my Linux installs. Did it on a virtual machine this time. 😁

That means I can extract all the files from the Torch Unix disks. Yay! They're all basically cpio archives so this doesn't work to get files out of the boot disk or limpet test.

So I tried this and it did pick up the first disk image in the folder but when I removed the SD and reinserted it it still kept looking at the first one.

Is there something else I'd need to do, or could it just be a Torch specific quirk? 🤔

City Snickers

The front of the Torch Triple X with the lid removed. An SD card is stuck into the top of the floppy drive panel and a grey usb stick is inserted underneath into the Gotek.

My SD card arrangement with the extension in the floppy panel at the front, was very useful for this as I didn't have to disturb the BlueSCSI at all.

Those boards are freakin' awesome. It happily accepted me pulling the card out and sticking it back without a whimper. Brilliant pieces of kit. 😁

Take out SD card.

Delete FD20.img

Copy disk 2 with filename FD20.img and reinsert. (Forgot to say that for disk 1 - you need to put the SD card back into the BlueSCSI. Duh.)

Type 'l' and press enter

Repeat for all 15 disks...

It was stupidly simple to do. Boot with the boot disk image on the Gotek and BlueSCSI.

Run the 'Remake Unix' script.

Reboot and run the 'Install backup' script.

Take out the SD card and copy disk 1 with filename FD20.img.

Type 'l' and enter.

Disk installs.

(Cont...)

I have an acute shortage of SD cards and USB sticks...

A lot of progress tonight. I installed all 15 of the Unix disks but, sadly, when I rebooted, I got stuck in a process loop. A process window opened then closed. A few seconds and another opened then closed etc etc.

Will try again tomorrow. 🙂

The Torch Triple X display showing the console output following completion of installing disk 2. Only 13 more to go...

I may have accidentally destroyed my Linux Mint install but at least I'm installing Unix now. 😁😁😁

(Well, I've installed two disks so far..)

#torchtriplex

Yep, a live distro followed by a hurried backup and then reinstall. Fortunately, it's on my dual boot machine and I didn't actually use the Linux install that much.

But still a pain in the arse and a valuable lesson learnt. 🫣

I couldn't log out ("No such process") so I had to hard reset.

Login screen now consists of a bare bones login prompt (no GUI for you any more young fella m'lad..)

Login has also forgotten who I am..

It's bad. 🤣

kermit the frog is covering his mouth with his hand and the words `` oh no '' are behind him . ALT: kermit the frog is covering his mouth with his hand and the words `` oh no '' are behind him .

Oh, it's far worse than that. I realised I was in up to my eyebrows when I saw the message "Couldn't delete innitab, file not empty..."

Just Googling "repair Linux Mint installation".

Still, at least now I know what the cpio command in the Torch install script should do. 😂

Whoops...

So. Apparently the cpio command in Unix is the same as in Linux. I also should read the manual. I just managed to copy all the files on Unix disk 1 to my Linux Mint install..not into a folder, like I thought.

Nope.

Never underestimate the power of the cpio command to fsck up your day.

A picture of the Torch Triple X attempting to run an installation. It has stopped with the error message "out of phase get help".

I went for it and tried the 'Remake Unix' option which worked. There's a fresh bare bones install on the SD card

But I can't get the floppy to work either BlueSCSI or Gotek. Gotek does nothing. BlueSCSI accesses and gives an error:

"Out of phase--get help."

I feel like it's talking to my soul..

Oh dear. At least it's only the man pages. 🙁

Does anyone know if it's possible to interface the BlueSCSI to an OMTI controller card?

It defeats the purpose but my original Torch HD is dead and the current config won't recognise the later drive and OMTI driven floppy drive correctly together..

But the boot disk must do something extra that activates the SCSI bus that the limpet disk doesn't.

I effectively have two floppy drives on the system, one on ID 0 LUN 2 (BlueSCSI) and the other one on SCSI ID 1 LUN 2.

But the Limpet disk doesn't actually crash, it just stops...

It's all getting VERY interesting.

It's a shame I can't make the Limpet disk work the same way i.e. by having the image on the BlueSCSI and Gotek. With the boot disk, it's almost like the Gotek hands control to the BlueSCSI during the boot.

A picture of the Torch Triple X that booted from a floppy disk image. There are three icons on the screen. Root folder, Shell and, (best of all) RemakeUnix.

Well @binarydinosaurs.co.uk you wouldn't happen to have images of Unix disks 16, 17 and 18 would you? I might need them. 😁😁😁😁

Just on a hunch I copied your latest image to the BlueSCSI and the Gotek (just in case) and it ONLY WENT AND BLOODY BOOTED!!

GET IN! 🥳

I'll be honest, I ran out of time tonight. I shall have a try at the boot disk tomorrow. 😁

Also, I had to copy the .img file on to the BlueSCSI to mount it. The 'floppy' on the hard disk image is definitely ID 0 LUN 2. I need to work out if there's a way to create a new floppy node in dev that points to ID 1 LUN 2 i.e. the gotek on the OMTI..

Some odd things on the disk:

There's a 'tmp' file with corrupt permissions.

The 'etc' folder comes up as 'bad folder' when I try to cd into it.

There's a file called 'Mnt' which made the system go haywire when I tried to cd into it (it's not a directory 😬).

A picture of the Torch Triple X display. A shell window is open and the Limpet test program has been run and will shortly crash.

Hey @binarydinosaurs.co.uk we're taking baby steps.

Managed to mount the limpet test disk on the bootable hard disk image. First time I've managed to mount anything in the floppy!

And I found the limpet test program! 😁 It crashes in OpenTop though (not a big surprise there).

A picture of the Torch Triple X monitor showing a kernel boot window as it boots from the v1.32 Torch boot disk. The boot has stopped at this point showing the largest runnable process as 1675264.

A picture of the Torch Triple X screen booting from the limpet test disk. The boot has stopped at the message "mem = 714752".

Torch Triple X update. The disk images from @binarydinosaurs.co.uk load up to a point but both the 'boot' and 'limpettest' hang with the Gotek showing no track number higher than 77.

I wonder if converting the 360rpm .scp files to 300rpm .img files has truncated them by a couple of tracks. 🤔

Converted .img file of the Torch Triple X Limpet test disk showing two sided disk with a speed of 300rpm in the HxC Floppy disk emulator software.

Original SCP file of the Torch Triple X Limpet test disk showing two sided disk with a speed of 360rpm in the HxC Floppy disk emulator software.

Sticking the SCPs through the Greaseweazle tools with the Torch Triple X diskdefs gives 300rpm and 10032 cell track length which matches the disk images I've done before.

I can't test them now but first chance I get tomorrow I'll put them on the Gotek and see what happens. 😁