1541/71 Bootable Disk Imaging CD (for DOS)
My primary environment for testing cables is DOS as it is easier to troubleshoot cable issues from. I therefore needed a boot floppy or CD to verify that the X cables work, that the computer's parallel port will work, and that tools such as MNIB/NIBTOOLS would work. Thus I created a bootable CD with all the latest imaging tools and CD drivers. Simply burn the image, boot it up and you're good to go. All the machine needs is a working CD-ROM drive and 32Mb of RAM as a 16Mb RAM disk is created to store the software tools and images.
The CD boots to DOS, creates a RAM disk to save the MNIB images into, and presents a menu to work from. Since it is self-contained, it doesn't interfere with the existing data on the local hard disk.
There are several caveats when working with this image:
- NTFS partitions are not supported, so if you don't have a FAT32 drive available to store the resultant images, you will have to find some other way, like a floppy, to copy them from the RAM disk.
- The boot image overrides drive A so if you need to save things to the floppy, use drive B instead.
The following packages and utilities are included on the CD:
- Star Commander v0.83.23 (beta)
- NibTools v0.5.8 (and older NibTools/MNIB versions in other folders)
- XCDETECT v0.18
- XCTEST v0.12
- 64Copy v4.42
- Many CD drivers to support the plethor of CD drives
The latest CD is version 2.1 from June 8, 2009. Download the zipped ISO Disk Imaging CD here or the raw ISO image here.
Email the author: Peter Schepers | Last updated: June 8, 2009