3.5 bootable for Turbosport

[Peter Sutton]

Has anyone managed to install uport 386 3.0e onto a Zenith Turbosport and could
give me some help.

Zenith Turbosport:
The Turbosport is a luggable 386 machine with integral hard disk and 1.44Mb
3.5" floppy. In way of expansion it has a serial and parallel port and
and a proprietary (?) system expansion port which is intended to link to a
Zenith 3 card XT expansion box.

Notes:
1 - It has no port for attaching a secondary drive.
2 - The 3.5" drive parameters cannot be altered using the machine's own
SETUP utilities. (As far as I can see).
3 - It will run Xenix and Interactive UNIX (so the adverts and Zenith engineers
say).

Attempts so far:

Using MSDOS:
1 - copied (1.2Mb 5.25") boot disk sector for sector onto 1.44Mb 3.5" - failed.
2 - copied boot disk first track to 3.5 first track and then did a sector to
sector copy of all the remaining sectors starting at the second track -
failed. When tried to boot off the disk got "Diskette unit 0 must be quad
density". This message comes from the boot disk's first sector - a hex edit
proved this.
3 - Did the same as 2 but edited the boot sector so that the 3.5" was
labelled correctly as a 18 sector per track 1.44Mb disk and not a 15 sector
a track 1.2Mb disk. This failed with the same error as above.


Using 286 uport (286 with both 1.2Mb 5.25" and 1.44Mb 3.5" drives):
3 - Formatted 3.5" disk to 1.2Mb (15 sectors a track) (Under DOS).
Used dd to copy boot disk onto this 3.5" disk (sector for sector).
Failed with "Diskette unit 0 must be quad density".
(mknod for second drive set as a 1.2Mb drive with 15 sectors a track).

Next I will try to:
a) Create character and block special files using mknod for a 1.44Mb
18 sectors per track secondary floppy device.
b) and build a boot disk onto a 1.44Mb disk in this drive either by
copying (and manipulating the data from) the 5.25" uport 386 3.0e boot
disk or by building from the 286 uport installed on the 286 machine (I know
that the 286 version works).

Questions:
1 - Is it possible to copy a boot disk (onto a different media) using MSDOS
perhaps with a little bit of hex editing!
2 - What does the "Diskette unit 0 ...." error message mean? I thought that
the boot disk would have to be at least 1.2Mb capacity which, I believe,
is high density.
3 - Does anyone know the mknod settings for uport 286 for a 1.44 disk drive?
(A second drive).

Thanks for your help in advance.

Peter Sutton, Electronic Publishing Research Group, Comp.Sci.Dept.,
University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham. NG7 2RD. UK.
(phone: UK - (0602) 484848 xt 2765)