by smp » March 23rd, 2014, 5:37 pm
Mike, you are the greatest!
I received my Altair Clone last Friday (Mar 21) safe & sound.
I got up and running quickly - your instructions are excellent. I was soon in CP/M and remembering that I've forgotten a lot about this old OS.
I gave Kermit a try, and got fouled up, as can be seen in my other posting in that thread. But PCGET works great and I managed to transfer some software into the Clone that I have been anxiously waiting to try. Wonderful!
Then came this morning, and when I started my machine, it would not boot CP/M, and the front panel lights seemed to be walking throughout all of memory. I took a look and my PROMs were gone, zeroed and disabled. As well, my floppy disks had reverted to "Scratch Disk."
Panic ensued pretty quickly.
While unconfidently poking around myself, I fired off an e-mail message to Mike. He answered very quickly, and gave me his phone number to call him directly. We spoke a few times, each time, Mike gave me more confidence that it was unlikely that I would severely damage the machine with what I was doing.
I managed to get Terra-Term working, in case Hyper-Terminal could have been part of the issue, and I got the Disk Boot Loader back in. Booting up into CP/M once again, I saw that my floppy disks were still there, it was just the descriptions that were changed. I got the other two PROMs back in and I've been running fine since.
I believe that I now know what my problem probably was - I believe I turned off power while I was in the Configuration Monitor. There is a warning in the manual that indicates that one should properly exit out of the Configuration Monitor and give control back to the Altair. Mike also told me that, if any changes are made while in the Configuration Monitor, they are made final when exiting back to the Altair. I will emphasize this: BEFORE TURNING OFF POWER TO THE MACHINE BE SURE TO EXIT TO THE ALTAIR. I believe that this error on my part probably caused the glitch I received. Today, I have power cycled many times, always having exited to the Altair, or directly powered down from CP/M, and I have not experienced any difficulty at all.
So, Mike, thank you very much for your superb direct on-the-phone support today. Thanks for bolstering my confidence and know-how. Thanks for creating such an excellent product.
Life is good.
smp