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Victor 9k / Sirius 1 Software

Bad news. I lost the ability to boot from hard drive. The dos 3.1 floppy had a sys command. I should have been suspicous because it mentioned a 2.x version again and the disk loaded with 3.x. i felt lucky and typed

sys b: a:

to transfer the dos from the disk to my hard drive, hoping to upgrade from 2.x to 3.x.

result however is now it boots to a frozen black screen. i can still boot to the floppy though, so not really bad but kind of bad, as i have no idea how to set up the disk without wiping it. and i guess i need more disks now.

side question, where does it say that i want the german keyboard. is there a file i can edit?

i think the 3.x dos has a different logic than the 2.x dos as to hidden files, their special location on the disk and maybe their size
 
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i spent today in version hell. it turns out that running the wrong chkdsk version started fixing hundreds of non existing hdd problems and corrupting it to death
 
after the mess the hard drive contents was toast. sys failed. syscopy was broken. format refused to work on the hard drive. finally, i used autoset that i copied from my hard drive before the mess to repartition and clean the hard drive. to my surprise it worked like a charm and took only some split second to execute (seriously - it was 1000 times faster than a format). afterwards it was possible to sys it from the floppy and it booted again.

i saved most of the hard drive content to floppy disk before autosetting the hard drive and will make it available hoping my floppy disks are readable by martin.

so the victor is in full working order with only original components.

restauration concluded with success.

you have been very quiet recently though. i uploaded a highlight video that maybe some might enjoy.

i also upgraded it after the video to full 768kB of ram using 8 additional 4164 ram ics. despite that being only 64 kB it recognised 128kB additionally. no dip switch adjustments were made.

thank you all for your help.

 
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DrAlis said:
Kermit however seems to run but my cable has not yet arrived... I wish there would be a norton commander or similar.
Click to expand...
Check out Intergalactic Commander: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/victor-9000-updates.1255722/

I haven't tested it on a real machine with a hard drive, but it works under Mame ok, and uses DOS for file access, so should be fine.
Works best under DOS 3.1
It isn't able to check if media is inserted under 2.11, so will crash out if a drive without media is selected.
 
DrAlis said:
after the mess the hard drive contents was toast. sys failed. syscopy was broken. format refused to work on the hard drive. finally, i used autoset that i copied from my hard drive before the mess to repartition and clean the hard drive. to my surprise it worked like a charm and took only some split second to execute (seriously - it was 1000 times faster than a format). afterwards it was possible to sys it from the floppy and it booted again.

i saved most of the hard drive content to floppy disk before autosetting the hard drive and will make it available hoping my floppy disks are readable by martin.

so the victor is in full working order with only original components.

restauration concluded with success.

you have been very quiet recently though. i uploaded a highlight video that maybe some might enjoy.

i also upgraded it after the video to full 768kB of ram using 8 additional 4164 ram ics. despite that being only 64 kB it recognised 128kB additionally. no dip switch adjustments were made.

thank you all for your help.

Click to expand...
Great to see the Victor work again! I hope, my Disks were useful.
 
DrAlis said:
i also upgraded it after the video to full 768kB of ram using 8 additional 4164 ram ics. despite that being only 64 kB it recognised 128kB additionally. no dip switch adjustments were made.
Click to expand...
Very glad to see you got your Victor back in shape. That's excellent news.

For the RAM, the Victor boot BIOS writes a pattern into RAM and tests that it can read the pattern to determine the RAM is there. The highest chip it reads successfully is considered how much RAM you have, so a missing or bad chip in one spot would prevent the system from seeing chips with higher addresses.
 
Thanks I am also quite cheerful.

The RAM check process seems similar to the 5160 XT. As for the sudden RAM creation, the surprise for why I gained more RAM (128kB) than I put in (64kB), I only have three possibile explanations. (1) There is 128kB bank size rather than the usual 64k. (2) One 64kB set was placed out of sequence in the expansion card (3) Pressing around on the board miracle healed a bad connection on the existing RAM. - It is not very important to find out what it was except for curiosity as it works.
 
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