Sunday 17 December 2017

SMSQ/E 3.32 AND FAT32 QXL.win DEVICE

This new facility is an excellent addition for Qx0 users. Back up of Qx0 hard disks and transfer of their contents to other QL systems has been problematic up to now. QPC2 uses the QXL.win file as hard disk, Supergold card QLs  would use the QUBide hard disk interface, while the disk structure of the Qx0 hard disk was based on the Atari hard disk conventions. Three incompatible systems. Here at QL Heaven the Q60 hard disk was originally backed up to compact flash cards via a CF reader, and then in addition it was copied to external hard disks via a caddy system. Both of the hard disk IDE slots on the primary ISA card are attached to caddies to allow swapping of IDE disks, not hot swapping however. Latterly the contents of the Q60 hard disk were exported to a QPC2 QXLwin file via the serial port to a USBwiz device. This was a magical system but never entirely stable or compatible with all file handling programs so the transfer was somewhat hard work.



Now there is the FAT32 QXL.win device. This is at an early stage of development but works just fine. QLHeaven can report the trouble free transfer of the entire contents of the Q60 hard disk to a QXL.win file masquerading as Win5_. A FAT 32 CFcard was used simply because one and a CF card reader were to hand. Below is the card reader sitting inside the caddy.


Below is a view of the caddies on the Q60. Find SMSQ/E 3.32 here


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