Introduction
The RC2014 is already ingenious as such. CP/M 2.2 with hard disk, CF card and floppy drive. What more could you want? Then take a look at Wayne Warthen's (RomWBW) descriptions of FDISK/FDISK80 and FAT and you will be amazed. You can access a DOS/FAT32 partition on the CF card with the FAT program and copy files to the RC2014. That's ingenious, isn't it?
Reference: Wayne Warthen - RomWBW/Doc/Hard Disk Anatomy.pdf
The size of a RomWBW CP/M slice is fixed! It is always ... 512 bytes/sector, 16 sectors/track, 64 tracks, 16 heads. Multiplied out, this gives 8,192 KByte or 8 MByte! There is also an additional track of 128 KByte as the system area.
Reference: Wayne Warthen - RomWBW/Doc/Hard Disk Anatomy.pdf
My CF cards, for example, have 48 or 32 MByte, which results in 5 or 3 slices. For a CP/M system, these are astronomical dimensions.
For further understanding it is very important that you read the RomWBW Readme.md file!
FDISK80
In order to be able to work with a DOS partition under RomWBW CP/M, it must of course first be created with FDISK80. Be sure to read the corresponding manual, see below.
A maximum of 3 slices of 8,320 KByte (8,192+128) fit on a 32 MByte CF card. This leaves 7,808 KByte for DOS. You must also note that the CP/M slices come before the actual DOS partition.
Actually, I use a different CF card with 48 MByte and 4 CP/M slices and one DOS partition.
If you have always wondered why you can't boot DOS from some CF cards, now you know why. The expensive industrial grade CF cards are bootable and are recognised as real hard disks. The cheap consumer CF cards are usually not bootable. Some can be made bootable, but not all. But that is another story.
Then you have to format the three slices with CLRDIR and that's it. Of course you cannot see the DOS partition, but it is there!
FAT
Now it gets interesting. How do I access the "invisible" DOS partition with RomWBW CP/M? And this is where FAT comes into action.
The FAT progam is, so to speak, an intermediary between DOS and CP/M. DOS knows nothing about CP/M slices and CP/M knows nothing about FAT partitions.
Reference: wwarthen / FAT; https://github.com/wwarthen/FAT
...
The application infers whether you are attempting to reference a FAT or CP/M filesystem via the drive specifier (char before ':'). A numeric drive character specifies the HBIOS disk unit number for FAT access. An alpha (A-P) character indicates a CP/M file system access targeting the specified drive letter. If there is no drive character specified, the current CP/M filesystem and current CP/M drive is assumed.
...
Reference: wwarthen / FAT; https://github.com/wwarthen/FAT
...
"2:README.TXT" refers to FAT file README.TXT on disk unit #2
"C:README.TXT" refers to CP/M file README.TXT on CP/M drive C
"README.TXT" refers to CP/M file README.TXT on current CP/M drive
...
Copying is also super simple!
Update 01.08.2021
I forgot to tell you that with FAT you can also format the DOS partition from the RC2014. You do not need DOS or Windows for this task.
External links
- Wayne Warthen:
- github.com / RomWBW
- github.com / README with (my personal) colour highlighting / PDF file
- github.com / ROM_1024KB / Many additional programs
- github.com / FAT / MS-DOS filesystem access / awesome!
- github.com / Hard Disk Anatomy (Hybrid) / pdf file
- github.com / FDISK80 / Setting up a HDD or CF-card / pdf file
Internal links
- RC2014 menu