Disklavier

I have a couple of OLD laptops just because they have Com ports RS232, floppy drives, and run Win 95 / Dos

Midi 

--- In disklavier@yahoogroups.com, "Frank & Gean Evans" <evans@...> wrote:
>
> Your last sentience says it all.
> I have always and will always keep an older system running WIN-ME with a bare minimum of utilities. It has 1 CDRW and one DVDRW as well as a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. 
> As time goes on you will find there are a lot of things that the latest and greatest will not (allow) you to do.
> With ME you can always drop to DOS as well.
> All this costs now is a little space as the "resale value" of a system that old is $0.00
> Kindest regards
> Frank
> Frank & Gean Evans
> www.hfevans.com
> www.mcatos.org
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: kenmortgages 
>   To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com 
>   Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2010 6:08 PM
>   Subject: [disklavier] Disc Copying - and Obsolete Technology
> 
> 
>     
>   Morning all
> 
>   I thought I'd post this warning about new technology as I spent hours yesterday searching for the answer. Last week I took posession of a few more PianoSoft Plus disks from the US. I never use original disks - always a copy and mostly from the hard drive attached to the Disklavier, using YAMPlayer.
> 
>   The problem - I have recently upgraded my workhorse desktop and no longer have a floppy drive inbuilt; I use a USB floppy which I transfer from PC to Notebook etc. To my horror I found that whilst I could boot from a DOS disk and load dkvcopy from the USB floppy, the program wouldn't recognise the PianoSoft disk in the floppy drive. Looking on Carol's website I came across a few other programs - riparoot for DOS and rootaripper for XP from the command window. Neither program worked with the USB floppy.
> 
>   Solution - in a friend's office this morning, I used his old XP with in-built floppy drive - and low and behold, immediate sucess with all of the above programs! I appears that the USB drive is not recognised by the operating system even though I can boot from that drive, copy files and so forth. This is quite a worrying thing as most notebooks from about 2000 onwards don't have an inbuilt floppy drive, and most desktop motherboards don't contain a IDE output for floppy drives any more (note that to drive a floppy the IDE output is 32 pins, and IDE hard drives have 40 pin sockets - which are often present beside SATA sockets).
> 
>   You may not need to copy/backup PianoSoft files very often but be warned you need a floppy drive which runs directly off the motherboard. I'll put in some more research but I don't think there is a simple answer - other than keeping an old legacy sytem.
> 
>   Cheers
>   Ken
>