by playthatbeat » Thu Mar 03, 2011 12:54 pm
SUCH brain damage over this upgrade nonsense past 2 days Upgrading an e4x to 4.x from 3.x..
Firstly, the only Flashprep files that seemed to work were those from the EMU website.. But, here's the scary part - i have 3 machines here, an e64 classic, an e4x and and e4xtultra, and 3 PCs - a modern XP machine that would only appear to write on 1 head (watching the output of the SFX disk imager as it worked) an old laptop that would fail every time right out, and a Dell GX1 i found in a skip that was happy once i fed it a nice new floppy..
To get any action at all on the e4x i had to use the floppy drive from the e64, as it's own one the light would not come on, and it took 20 mins to format a disk. With the e64 drive, it would recognise the FLASHPREP downloaded from EMU, but only if i made the disk in my oldschool Dell X1 in DOS. This disk would not work in my e4xtultra at all though, and NONE of the software disk images could be read by any of my EMUs, except for the 4.62 upgrade, which the e4xtultra could see.
So, i made a COPYSYS disk of 4.10b from the ultra, and used that no problem after FLASHPREP on the e4x.
I still have the option to use the 4.6 or 4.7beta on the ultra i suppose, but i'm OK as i am i think.
So, the bottom line - SUSPECT EVERYTHING.
Go for new-ish floppies, and format them in a MAC, Amiga, ST or the EMU first, then write to them in PC DOS or CMD mode. make disks from every image you can get hold of and label them, then if these fail, try a different floppy drive in the PC, or a different PC. If all of these fail, swap the drive in Your emu, and restart the process.
SOONER OR LATER you will get an image to work, but with the variance i am seeing, it's NOT just the PC O.S. that is a factor, it's also the image files and the floppy drives in both the PC and the Samplers!
What i think we need is for someone to make PROPER disk images from known working floppies, these SFX exe things are ropey..