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Archiving Systems with No Easy Export Path

NeXT

NeXT

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The Wang Professional Computer I picked up over the weekend has the original hard drive in it and while copies of the system and diagnostic diskettes appear to be available on IA ( https://archive.org/details/wang_professionalcomputersystemv201 ) it looks to be an incomplete set. If I try those disks on a second floppy-only machine the menu system is there but a lot of the applications (Wang word processor) and utilities (WANG Dialect BASIC) which I have on the hard drive are not on the floppies. Furthermore my machine came with the software for the MDA/IBM PC emulation card which does not appear to be archived anywhere so it's vital that I archive this hard drive.
I don't have an MFemulator or a floppy emulator, so the easy move of just dumping the disk as-is will not work. Likewise while we are an MS-DOS compatible machine we are not PC compatible, so most applications I can think of for sending over the serial port (Laplink and PCmaster/PCslave) will (probably?) not work either because it expects an IBM PC compatible or the fact Wang used a Centronics port for the printer and not DB25 like a regular parallel port and I don't have an adapter. I do however have access to the BACKUP command which should let me save the whole machine as-is to a mountain of floppy disks which I can in turn archive to a disk image format and push the whole bundle of disk images (there seems to be about 5mb used on the disk already) to IA, but this seems dirty because then you are more or less forced to read all those disks back in to regenerate the disk on another machine, much like the factory restore disks I found for the Apricot Xen. Is there a better way to do this?
 
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Can (PK)ZIP run on the Wang? If so, then you could make a multi-disk spanning .zip file and extract the whole thing onto an IBM PC compatible where you have more options to organize/archive the files.

You could use Kermit to transfer over serial port. There is a version for the Wang:

https://www.kermitproject.org/archive.html

Scan for "Wang" on the page and you'll get to the text describing the version you need.

If opting for the BACKUP route, there is a program you can use to extract the files that should be safer/better than RESTORE:

https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/msdos/diskutil/restaur1.zip

This one is free software, includes Turbo Pascal source, extracts from BACKUP files made by multiple DOS versions, and allows you to extract just the files you want without necessarily going through all the disks.

Those are the methods I can think of off the top of my head. If you need others, just let us know.
 
Unfortunately BACKUP was not the same thing over the years. Different versions of DOS and different OEMs had different implementations of it. Some literally just copied the files as-is to a set of floppies, leaving blank space if the next file wouldn't fit on the disk, while others split up some files to make sure each disk was 100% full but left the rest of the files as-is, and yet others combined all the files into an archive (BACKUP.001, BACKUP.002, etc.).
 
Kermit requires me though to rebuild the directory structure. It also does not preserve the established DOS version which is another issue because Wang is using an OEM MS-DOS 2.x
 
vwestlife said:
Unfortunately BACKUP was not the same thing over the years. Different versions of DOS and different OEMs had different implementations of it.
Click to expand...

The program I pointed to, RESTAUR, was written with these problems in mind. It's supposed to handle different versions of BACKUP, perhaps even different implementations. It will restore BACKUPs made from versions 2.0 to 3.3 and is even supposed to be able to handle the different format DOS 4 introduced. I think it might be usable for getting stuff off the Wang.

Take a look at the source code and see what you think.

There is also another program that has the same function:

https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/msdos/diskutil/restor61.zip

I didn't mention it before because it doesn't have the source code (which might be important for adapting to the Wang) and it has a more restrictive license.
 
NeXT said:
Kermit requires me though to rebuild the directory structure. It also does not preserve the established DOS version which is another issue because Wang is using an OEM MS-DOS 2.x
Click to expand...

If you can get ZIP or another archiver to work and you have enough free space on the HD, you could make the .zip file on the HD and then transfer it with Kermit. The directory structure would be kept intact. Then, instead of using BACKUP, you'd only have to create a boot disk on the Wang and make an image of that for DOS version preservation.
 
You could write a raw disk image reader (using whatever API Wang has instead of normal INT 13h) and dump the output to serial port.
 
Maybe you could take out the hard drive and attach it to a standard PC with a compatible controller. For example if Wang used a Western Digital MFM controller, then I'd think a standard ISA WD MFM controller would be able to read it.
 
shattered said:
You could write a raw disk image reader (using whatever API Wang has instead of normal INT 13h) and dump the output to serial port.
Click to expand...
Building on to this idea, if CTTY COM1 works to connect from another machine using a null modem cable, the problem reduces to having something that xmodem/zmodems or even hexdumps disk sectors to standard out.
 
Thing with the MFM emulator from pdp8online, is, you can make an image of your drive, then use it in emulator mode if the drive fails. Found it to be really good (shame though its so big as I need to replace a rodime 3.5" drive.
 
shattered said:
You could write a raw disk image reader (using whatever API Wang has instead of normal INT 13h) and dump the output to serial port.
Click to expand...
I've looked through my files from 15 years ago when I imaged a Wang PC (with no monitor, so I had to do it entirely headless). As I recall, I wrote WDTROJ.BIN onto a blank floppy, and booted from it; and that then dumped what it found out to the serial port. Then, once I'd captured the output at the other end, cap2bin would turn it back to a drive image. Looking at the file dates, I imaged the MSDOS partition and the partition table on separate dates and WDTROJ has the date of the partition table, so it's possible WDTROJ will only image the partition table and you'll have to reconstruct a version that reads the rest of the drive.
 

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