Sorry O.T.
DwSoFt said:
...isn't a USB /cd/floppy available (pur habit is in the cabinet) I make one right away. never know when it will save your ***.
Amen Dan, but do you make floppies if needs be for legacy equipment?
Shudders...
This week I'm in the process of transferring some old SIEMENS S5 program backups, from about 20 years go, to my computer using a trusty FREECOM USB Floppy Drive. I've been on to my co-ordinator for ages that if the remaining couple of S5's go senile and start losing their memory, then I would not like to be relying on these floppies in the cabinet to save the day. At least there are backups available, but you know how unreliable floppy disks can be after so many years sitting there.
I've also received a modified EXE file for an old mini PC interfaced to a robot labeller (Mitsubishi), which is interfaced to our JDE barcoding system. The PC has a floppy drive and an internal IDE CF Card reader, no hard drive. So the DOS OS is running on the CF Card and any transfers or updates to the CF are done via the floppy drive.
The CF Card died a couple of weeks ago and we had to temporarily install a stripped down version of the OS and application and boot and run it from the floppy drive. That took a whole day and evening. Then we couldn't get our hands on a spare CF with the right capacity (2GB or less) to format it correctly. So I had to use DISKPART in DOS in XP to partition a larger card and resize it, then format it and install DOS onto it in the old PC using 3 floppies and then get it to boot and run the application. That all sounds straight forward, but every step was a marathon. Two days of absolute joy with that one!
So now I have to delve into it again, this week, to try get this modified EXE file to run for a relatively small mod.
Double shudder...
So this week, I will be mainly working with floppy disks and the old DOS OS, and lots of coffee.
Fingers X'd!
Isn't it funny how so many of todays software products still use the floppy disk as its icon for "Save"...
C:\exit
cdnrookie,
Maybe if you can give any manufacturer specific details for the paint shop, then someone here might be able to work some magic?
G.