Trying to create a SAMDOS boot disk without having a SAMDOS boot disk

Submitted by Loccy on Tue, 09/24/2024 - 17:50

Hi all, childhood Sinclair'er here, and have just managed to grab a SAM.

My SAM came with a drive, but no disks. I've been trying to find a way to make a SAMDOS boot disk but am struggling. 

I had rather hoped I could use the External Drive Interface tape image which ostensibly comes with a version of SAMDOS. from your page https://www.worldofsam.org/products/external-drive-interface. Have loaded the thing in via my Maxduino, told it I have only one drive, fed in 80 sectors, double-sided and 3ms for step speed, which apparently is stock internal MGT drive. It then prompts me for a disk to format, I feed it one, press Return...

...and it hangs. No disk activity, I can't break into the program. I can NMI-button into the program, but it seems to have crashed to some degree (it seemed to have corrupted the character R!).

Is the EDI tape image specific to that actual interface - is it some "special" flavour of SAMDOS? Is there a "clean" TZX of SAMDOS out there? Or is should what I'm doing work, suggesting there's something else wrong? The drive does do stuff if I shove a disk in after a cold start and type "boot", and I did replace the belt. However, as the disk I'm using is "Windows 3.0 German Installation Disk 1" for an Atari PC, the "19 Loading Error" is possibly to be expected :)

Profile picture for user Dan Dooré
Dan Dooré Fri, 09/27/2024 - 13:13

The EDI tape is SAMDOS v1.1 - you need to use SAMDOS2 if your ROM is V2.0 or later!

I can send you a disk with SAMDOS2 written on for the price of postage!

Loccy Wed, 10/02/2024 - 13:44

The offer's much appreciated but someone on Spectrum Computing was able to give me a copy of SAMDOS 2 as a TZX.

Not sure if cross forum threads are allowed, but for posterity here's a link to the thread:

https://www.spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12132&sid=61b74b9aa9f0cd2c12a3f92d9d7a39a

I was able to use the info in the third post in the thread and the attached TZX to load SAMDOS from tape, then format a disk and make a boot disk.

Just updating here as well as it might be useful to others in the future.

Profile picture for user flatduckrecords
flatduckrecords Wed, 10/16/2024 - 14:01

I modified the EDI TZX file, replacing the version of SAMDOS with version 2. (I trimmed off the other utilities to keep it simple as well). Here's a copy in case Loccy or others find it useful!