Mtools works on 3B1's DOS73 file partition(s)!

[Thad P Floryan]

Though many have heard my "MS-DOS vadanya" jokes, I've got to admit that I
recently saw something that really impressed me, and this was because a friend
of a friend lost the use of his borrowed '386 machine and was loaned a 3B1 so
he could continue writing his novel ... except, his backup disks from the '386
were 3-1/2" 720K DOS-format.

Well, I helped my friend by bringing over a 3-1/2" drive to read the files
in on the UNIXPC.  Took all of about 5 minutes to make the (temporary) long
34-wire ribbon cable and hook it all up.  Then used Emmet Gray's latest
mtools 2v0p2 to read them in without a hitch into a UNIX directory.

Now the problem was to get the files over to the other guy's UNIXPC and to
place them on the DOS partition.  Did some reading (yeah, finally RTFM! :-)
and browsing of Emmet's code and I asked my friend "What's dvd000?"  BINGO!

Mtools was able to read, write, create sub-dirs, etc into the DOS73 partition
ALL from the UNIX side.  Wow!

So, a quick "uuto" of the files-read-from-floppy and the Mtools package over
to the other guy's system, a simple "mcopy", and a test with WordPerfect 5.1
on the other guy's system on the remotely-booted DOS73 partition and
everything worked just fine.

To say the least, I was simply amazed.

And a hearty "THANK YOU!" to Emmet Gray for his "mtools" software suite.

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]