Date   : Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:40:22 +0100
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Torch Hard Drive System

Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
>> Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
>>> I still need to get my Torch Server working again so I can recover
>>> all that lovely data locked away on the hard drive :)
>> What sort of server and what's up with it? I've got all sorts of Torch 
>  
> It's the big brown thing in the photograph at
> http://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/BBC/pics From memory it has a 20M drive
> in partitioned into two 8M and one 4M drives.

Oh, lucky you :-) I've got one of those too; it's the worst-designed machine 
I've ever come across, I think. The other grey-cased BBC-derived Torches were 
a lot nicer in build quality.

Mine's got a very-dead BASF hard disk in it, and one of the ex-engineers tells 
me they were notorious for failing even when new :-( I've not yet stumbled 
across the formatter for the system, hence the reason I've never tried to get 
it going.

I suspect the best plan with yours would be to disconnect the drive / bridge / 
SASI host adapter and see if you can get the Z80 board going just using a CP/N 
boot floppy; at least then you'd know if it was the disk hardware playing up 
or not...

> It's so big and cumbersome it's not easy
> to have it occupying desk space that would make it easy to twiddle
> with it.

That's another reason for not doing anything with mine ;)  Pretty keyboard, 
though. Mine lives in a cupboard under the stairs and provides emergency 
shelter for wayward spiders...