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Data General MV2000DC and DS7500

G

GottaLottaStuff

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Apr 6, 2011
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Central Virginia, USA
Anybody remember these? I have about 20 5 1/4" floppies with software like the hard disk formatter, Term Manager, TermController, TermServer, and Adex Level A. There is also MV/2500 DC User Friendly Diags and a hard disk formatter for MV1400DC, MV2000DC_II / DS7500_II. Anyone know what kind of floppy disk format these would be?
 
Believe it or not, there are still MV2000 users out there. I'd have to go to my archives to refresh my memory on the floppy format, however.
 
Data General's 5.25 floppy drives in the MV-2000/1400 computers have a 720kb capacity. Formatting them using the MV was always a pain because you had to bring down the system to reach the diag/format utility menu. This meant the system was unavailable to other users until formatting the floppies were complete. What was interesting was MS-DOS could format the 720kb format but would only allow you to do so on a 3.5" drive. There was a MS-DOS utility for the pc called FormatQM that didn't care what drive was attached and would allow you to format a 5.25 floppy in a 1.2mb HD drive using the standard MS-DOS 720kb format. This worked perfectly to format floppies for the MVs. At this point, both the MV and the PC could access/read/write the floppies using such OS's as XP, Windows 95/98/2k as well as AOS/VS on the MV side. Once the MV wrote data to these floppies, (using a variety of methods like copy, dump, move etc), the pc could no longer access them. I assume this is because of the differences in file organization (FAT vs. I-don't-know-what). Anyway, even though the original formats are the same in terms of sectors, tracks, capacity, etc, these floppies will be foreign to the pc world. Your floppies have useful utilities on them for MV users such as myself. I would be VERY interested in having them if you ever wanted to part with them. I have been searching quite some time for floppies labeled System Media, adex format, (or similar words to that effect). -Tom
 
I have an MV2000 DC that needs a bit of care. From reading JTpinch post it sounds like it's possible to make compatible floppies on a PC. In that case I would be grateful for floppy images at least.
 
For backup purposes, I have the ability to create copies of Data General diskettes, 360kb or 720kb capacities. (Some DG systems, like the "Desktop Generation" had 360kb drives). If anyone needs help with this, please let me know.
 
Pontus, If your tapes for the mv2000 are the 21mb DC-1000 cartridge tapes, I have the ability to copy them to the mv's hard drive as a single file disk image (kind of like pkzip but without compression) and recreate a new tape at any time. As far as the physical drive itself, DG used an Irwin model 125 unit in their mv1400/mv2000 computers. But, they put their own EPROM on them to keep users from buying and using off the shelf tape drives. The tapes themselves need the Alpha format off the shelve or can be formatted using dg's format utility. At one time, I did have a standard Irwin 125 in a pc, but I never tried reading DG tapes with it. If my memory is correct, I believe the pc used a different format scheme then the Alpha. Copying tapes today involve two significant issues. Fist, the tapes cartridges use a "band" to spin the tape reels. I'm finding that over time, this band degrades (even on tapes still "new" in the box). When the band fails, anything bad that can happen to the tape, probably will. I was recently lucky enough to salvage a tape by replacing the band with a known good band from another tape, then copy it before that band failed and ruined the tape for good. Second, finding "new" dc-1000 tape cartridges is no easy task. Even if you can find them, the internal "band" may no longer be any good. Long story short, copying dg tapes is now a risky business.
 
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