Life After TRSDOS.

[doctortom6]

In the early 80's, I had experience with a dual-floppy machine but this is my first time with a TRS-80. I put in the TRSDOS Working Copy that came with my Model 4 and get the logo and a prompt. I cannot find what to put into the prompt that will let me use the disk in slot 2. I try number/letter combinations with nothing working. Since some numbers and letters will not type into the prompt area, I am not sure if the keyboard is working. Now, my question. After I get to the prompt, what do I type in to make slot 2 work? Should I pull out the DOS disk from slot 1 and use that slot and press enter? Please help because once I figure that out, I am good with everything else because I have, I'm sure, every book ever written about the TRS-80. Thank you.

 

[Ole Juul]

Welcome to the forums!

I use other DOSes, but the basic commands are "a:" then hit enter, to get to the A drive. To get to the B drive, type "b:" and hit enter. To see what is on the drive type "dir" and hit enter. Is this what you were looking for?

 

[kb2syd]

The boot drive is :0, the other drive is probably :1.
DIR :0 does a directory of drive 0, DIR :1 will give you a directory of drive 1. To execute a program on drive :1 you would type

progname:1

Hope that helps.
Kelly

 

[Ole Juul]

kb2syd: The boot drive is :0, the other drive is probably :1.

Oops! I see now. TRS-DOS is very different from the other DOSes. (blush) I just did some reading to educate myself on the topic (so I won't sound so dumb the next time). The asked for information is actually not that readily found on the net. However I did find a page which confirms what kb2syd says:

1. At the TRSDOS command line, programs could be executed by typing the filename. Programs used an extension of /CMD, but typing the extension wasn’t required when running a program.
2. A TRSDOS filename consisted of an eight character filename, delimited by a slash, followed by a three character extension, delimited by a colon, followed by a drive number. For example: FILENAME/EXT:0
3. If a program or file wasn’t found on the first drive, TRSDOS would also search all other drives in the system.