Greetings! I am a noobie to the NeXT forums, and I hope someone can help me.
I have recently obtained a NeXTCube 040 running OpenStep 4.2, but the MO drive has died (as you might expect). Still, I have four original NeXT OEM MO disks with NeXTStep OS 0.8, 0.9, 1.0., and 2.0 on them (unless the previous owner abused the disks?), and I'd like to transfer those files to CD format so I can access them in the future. But I need to find someone with both a working NeXT MO drive and a CD burner to do that!
Has anyone had success doing this before? Any advice would be appreciated.
Cheers,
PS Two
Welcome to the forums Paul & I wish you luck trying to get everything off the MO's. :D
Dear Esteemed Members of the Forum:
I have been very gratified by the helpful responses that I have received from several of you!
Kudos and shouts out must go to kb7sqi, idylukewild, and gtnicol -- these are all great fellows who made this noobie feel right at home! Thanks so much for the assistance and sage advice, guys.
Based on the suggestion of middleman extraodinaire idylukewild, I am now working with gtnicol to obtain data dumps of all four of my MO disks. I will discuss uploading those resulting images to the site hosted by kb7sqi in the near future. This will only be done with the permission of kb7sqi, of course!
Meanwhile, all hail the NeXT Computers Forum!
A very happy new member,
PS Two
Quote from: "PS Two"Dear Esteemed Members of the Forum:
I have been very gratified by the helpful responses that I have received from several of you!
Kudos and shouts out must go to kb7sqi, idylukewild, and gtnicol -- these are all great fellows who made this noobie feel right at home! Thanks so much for the assistance and sage advice, guys.
Based on the suggestion of middleman extraodinaire idylukewild, I am now working with gtnicol to obtain data dumps of all four of my MO disks. I will discuss uploading those resulting images to the site hosted by kb7sqi in the near future. This will only be done with the permission of kb7sqi, of course!
Meanwhile, all hail the NeXT Computers Forum!
A very happy new member,
PS Two
Hey Paul,
I told you everyone here tries to be helpful as possible! :wink: Glad you found the assistance you needed. Feel free to upload when you get the time. The archive serves one purpose. To help other users get use out of their systems. I know for me, it's been years since I looked at the older releases of NEXTSTEP. I loved seeing NS2.2 again. And again welcome to the forums. Take care & keep in touch. :D
Woah, NS 0.8!
Paul-
Thanks for the great feedback! Welcome to the group! It's working with folk like you that makes it fun!
Luke
All's well that ends well.
Thanks to gtnicol, I now have dumps of NeXTStep OS 0.9, 1.0, and 2.0 -- but sadly, the disk labeled as OS 0.8 had been overwritten by the previous owner, with files from what appears to be several network users. (Sorry about that, krfkeith!)
I will be sharing these dumps with kb7sqi very soon.
Things like this are where my inner-dork meet up with my inner-history buff! I'd be excited to see some good screen shots... very cool find. Thanks for sharing and to those who helped to rescue.
yeah, i would love to see a bunch of good screenshots. I love computer history related items.
I can make some screenshots of 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 etc. if people are interested.
BTW. I also have a recording of 0.8 MO booting... I was so happy when I finally fixed the MO :)
no we are not interested ... :roll: come on !! :lol: :D what are you waiting ? I wan to see some early screenshots forever, a booting video, even better 8)
OK. I'll grab some screenshots tonight.
gtnicol: how hard is repairing an MO drive? I would like to boot my NeXTcube (if I ever get it! :? ) into early releases of NeXTSTEP, also, what is the last NeXTcube that has an MO? Or can even have an MO? A non-turbo 040? Can it boot into NS .8?
I've been lucky... I have 2 MO drives that I have repaired that seem remarkably reliable. In general, cleaning and reflowing dry joints etc. seems to be the best way to proceed, but in some cases, it seems the drives are just dead.
I should note though that I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours repairing drives and the corrupted 0.8 MO disk I had. I screwed up some drives too... messed up the linear optical encoder etc. before I figured out what not to do with them :)
There is definitely something about calibration that I have no clue about: a number of drives I've worked on get to the spin up cycle or the seek cycle. Some of them are obviously spinning up too high or low judging by the sound of the motor compared to a good drive. There are little trim pots everywhere, but I haven't had time to trace circuits or otherwise experiment enough to figure out how to calibrate the drives.
I don't know if 0.8 will boot on an 040/25. I'll try it out. My DORS SCSI disk with 0.8 on it doesn't boot on a 040, but that's seems more like a ROM issue (FWIW. 0.8 can't use all 2gigs ona DORS). I'll try booting from OD for kicks :)
I didn't get much of a chance to take screenshots... busy working. There are a couple of 0.8 and 1.0 screens on flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15578792@N02I'll try to get some more tomorrow... better quality. Those were taken with my iPhone.
[/url]
nice :)
The "DIrectory Browser" in the 0.8 release looks like a pain :P
was the "photon" code name of release 0.8? very nice to see the screenshots :) can anybody tell how to use that dump or tar images you made? I have a nextstation mono and 040 cube, and want to restore the system on that machines?
Thanks for the shots... especially the dissected MO. A very cool little show and tell. Makes me want to try for a cube once I have the money... whenever that'll be. Thanks again and keep'em coming.
Yes, 'photon' seems to have been the release name for 0.8. The directory browser in 0.8 through 1.0 doesn't have scrollbars, and intead has up/down arrows.
Other interesting things is the lack of the .app extension, and on the bottom left, the 'black hole' :)
I'll go boot my machines and see if I can get some better quality screen shots.
I added some additional photos of 0.8, 0.94 and 1.0 to photo stream on flicker.
I'm trying to remember, but I think when running 0.8 from OD, if you click on a directory in the workspace, the cursor changes to a screaming head. Certainly one of 0.8/0.94 did this... caught me by surprise.