[LAU] Ensoniq ASR-10 Boot Disk Required

[Sean Bolton]

Hi Nick,

On Sat Jan  5 2013, Nick Copeland wrote:
> > From: gnome at hawaii.rr.com
> > On 01/05/2013 09:12 AM, Nick Copeland wrote:
> > >  > > Ensoniq bootable. Does anybody have a 3.5 boot disk with a
> > >  > > version of OS later than 2.01 (I think this was the version
> > >  > > that supported the SCSI driver).
> > >  > A fried of mine had an Ensoniq, and he suggested that you
> > >  > should
> > > check with
> > >  > rubber chicken software, who apparently have such for download.
> > >  > <http://chickensys.com/kb/eps-asr/index.html>
> > >  > which might get you the stuff you need. Good luck.
> > >
> > > I have a feeling this need an IDE (PATA) floppy. I have four PC
> > > in house and none of them have a floppy. Tested the software
> > > using VM and it failed the boot disk write operation since
> > > Ensoniq had a very proprietary format.
> > 
> > Maybe you can buy an internal floppy drive (I'm guessing a 3.5"
> > floppy) and add it to one of your existing PCs? Floppy disks and
> > controllers weren't very smart ...
> 
> That might work, I think at least one of the PC (they are all laptop)
> had anoption for FDD so it might have an IDE connector somewhere.
> 
> > dd might be able to write the floppy, too, if you get a disk image
> > and a drive that supports that format.
> 
> Long shot. DD still only writes blocks so it depends on the
> underlying diskdriver for the actual drive format. These are not DOS
> or NTFS format so AFAIKthere are no drivers for them on Linux. I did
> find a few references for Linux RWtools although they did not support
> writing bootable OS disks. Will take one of the older laptops apart
> and look for the disk connector types. Regards, nick

Many years ago I would read and write EPS disks using an IDE FDD and a
stock linux kernel.  I think this was around the late kernel 2.4 days.
The trick was to use setfdprm(1) to set the correct disk format first
-- and unfortunately, I don't seem to have kept a record of the needed
settings. (The EPS would only use DD disks, while the ASR can use both
DD and HD disks.) This site:

http://yceran.org/eps/

is out-of-date but may point you in the right direction (also google
'ensoniq setfdprm').

I still have the PC with the floppy drive in it. If you end up having a
hard time locating a suitable drive, I could blow the dust bunnies out
of mine and see if it still works.

-Sean