File transfer to and from an Iyonix, via USB stick

Hi everyone,

I have been asked to recover an archive of musical scores (in Sibelius 7) from an Iyonix machine. It’s running RISC OS 5.13. I have never used a RISC OS machine before, but I had a BBC Micro back in the day and have used various Unix boxes since.

The machine boots up and the files are all there. My immediate aim is to back them up in case the hardware stops working. But I can’t get the machine to recognise external USB sticks.

As I understand it, USB sticks have to be 2GB or less and formatted as FAT16. I’ve formatted an old 2GB stick as FAT16 on my Mac, and given it a simple name (ABC). When I put it in the Iyonix, the !USBinfo utility can see that it’s plugged in, but I don’t know how to mount it. It doesn’t show up in Discs.

I thought I might try reformatting the USB stick on the Iyonix side to see if that helps. It doesn’t show up in HForm, which can only see the main hard disk. There’s a utility called !SCSIForm which can see the stick in SCSI slot 0 (somehow USB is mapped onto SCSI on these machines). But it won’t reformat the stick. It says the disc capacity is 0MBytes, asks me to insert disk -1, and then fails.

Any suggestions for what I can try next would be gratefully received!

(Once I’ve done a backup I need to turn those Sibelius files into PDFs. My plan is to do that using PrintPDF/GhostScript, either on the Iyonix itself, or on another machine under emulation, provided I can move Sibelius. But first I need to be able to transfer files on and off the Iyonix.)

Best,

Tom.

Format the stick to FAT32 and use Fat32FS, this is in my experience much more reliable than trying to let DOSFS handle things.

You don’t need to “mount” the stick in any way if it is properly recognized by whatever FS the IYONIX is running – an additional drive icon should pop up on the iconbar if the USB subsystem is correctly initialized. However, RISC OS 5.13 is really really old, I am not sure if it already has the USB 2.0 stack, which could be a problem. If you can, softload a later version – don’t flash it, it is too risky to brick the IYONIX.

Another route to backup is to make an image of the IDE disc itself on any other machine using an IDE-USB adapter. Linux should work fine via dd. Then access the image via filecore-understanding software (which reminds me to publish FilecoreImageReader…). This has the added advantage of a much speedier progress – doing I/O on RISC OS machines is not the fastest thing in the world.

It doesn’t show up in Discs.

As mentioned by Steffen, it should show up directly on the icon bar. The “Discs” icon is for shared network discs. If it was up to me, it wouldn’t be called that :)

Thanks both! No, it’s not showing up on the icon bar. I tried both FAT32 and FAT16 with the same results.

The !USBinfo utility seems to imply that the storage device is connected via USB1.2. But a “read me” file on the machine implies that the USB ports are USB 2.0 hardware. So presumably the problem is indeed the lack of drivers.

How do I softload anything onto the Iyonix if USB storage isn’t working? Are there CD images I can use? Or (god forbid)… do I need to use a floppy?

How do I softload anything onto the Iyonix if USB storage isn’t working?

Is the Iyonix connected to a network? You might use SunFish to transfer files via NFS (if you like Unix) or !FTPc to transfer to an FTP server.

If you can’t get an internet connection to download some kind of file transfer software, RISC OS has ShareFS built in, which allows perr to peer sharing between RISC OS machines. If you have a Raspberry Pi you could put RISC OS on that, hook the machines together, and copy things across, then access USB from the Pi.

Floppy discs would work well, if you have another machine to read them on!

If you’ve got an older SD card reader, try plugging that in to the Iyonix. I’ve tended to find using a card reader more reliable than a USB stick direct. Same issues about disc format, however.

Something to check… press Ctrl-F12 to open a task window, then type Unplug. It will return a list of unplugged modules. Check that there aren’t any SCSI ones in the list.

In addition to the above then look in the Utilities directory on the Iyonix and you may have a copy of USBInfo in there that you can run and once it is on the iconbar just click the Mouse/Select, left hand mouse button, and you should get a widown up that shows the USB ports being used and what is hanging off them.

As stated 5.13 is old and you could try downloading and installing firstly the latest hardisc image from the download section on this site.

If you use the self extracting version you will need to change the file type to &FFC, mouse select the downloaded file so it is highlighted and then the menu, midlle mouse button, and then accross to File ‘’ and then Set Type and then type in &FFC and hit the return.

Once this is down then double mouse select button on it and it will extract to the where the file is.

Now copy over most of the hard disc image over your hard disc, except !Boot, and once that is done find !Boot on your hard disc and then douible mouse select on it and the Configuration window will open.

Select the Boot icon and then Install and then drag the new !Boot from the extracted download to the window and then hit merge and once it has completed Set and then reboot your Iyonix.

Try the USB drive again.

If that doesn’t do it then go to downloads and Iyonix and download the Softload 5.28.

Extract the !Boot application within the soft directory and then as per above install/merge that !Boot and then reboot and try again.

The new hard disc image will also include an updated Filecore formatter, version 2.76?, that can format SCSI drives if they are seen.

One other thing to try is Fat32Fs

Download it, open up the archive and then go in to the Pre-desk directory and Mouse double select, left hand mouse button, to copy to your hard drive.

Reboot and try the USB stick.

Hope this helps.

Update:

Forgot to ask which USB port are you plugging the USB stick/drive in, is it the front or rear ones.

Just try the opposite ones to which ever you have used so far.

Thank you all for these additional suggestions — I really appreciate it!

There is lots to try here, but the obvious thing (and I can’t believe I overlooked this) is to plug the Iyonix into my Ethernet router. I will let you know how I get on.

There is lots to try here, but the obvious thing (and I can’t believe I overlooked this) is to plug the Iyonix into my Ethernet router. I will let you know how I get on.

I can’t recall whether the early Iyonix builds had reliable DHCP – so you may need to go static IP

Wasn’t there some rudimentary “don’t show me USB devices I don’t want to see” stuff in the IYONIX boot sequence? Something like “HideSCSI”? Maybe this is the case why an inserted USB stick shows in the USB subsystem, but not as a drive. Maybe connect a few USB sticks or card readers at once and hope that one of them is not hidden…

How do I softload anything onto the Iyonix if USB storage isn’t working? Are there CD images I can use? Or (god forbid)… do I need to use a floppy?

No CD image ready-made that I know of, but if you have an idea what you’d like to have on it, I could easily produce it for you. But you can of course DIY with the help of any emulator with a host filing system and ZIP – then put the ZIP that was created under RISC OS control onto a CD. Hopefully your IYONIX still has SparkFS or SparkPlug or Unzip on it, or else it gets a bit more involved (self-extracting SparkPlug, or create the CD image with true CDFS filetype extension).

I can’t recall whether the early Iyonix builds had reliable DHCP – so you may need to go static IP

I am pretty sure that DHCP worked fine since the first widely released version of RISC OS 5 (5.02 IIRC) – I had an early developer prototype and I remember that DHCP was nearly the first thing I tested, and it worked.

I am pretty sure that DHCP worked fine since the first widely released version of RISC OS 5 (5.02 IIRC)

Yes – bought mine as soon as available (2003ish) and dhcp worked out of the box.

Thank you for all those suggestions. I’ve made some progress.

I plugged the Iyonix into our Ethernet, set it up to use DHCP, and it worked… sort of. It connects to the network fine, but DNS seems to work for some sites (eg Google) and not for others (eg this site). The web browser is something called Oregano 2, but it’s a limited demo version that doesn’t allow saving of files. So this does not look like a viable way to get stuff onto the Iyonix. There are no other file-transfer clients that I can see; I don’t think this machine was ever connected to the internet by its owner. As far as I can tell, he just printed things.

So next I tried the suggestion of plugging in an old SD card reader, instead of a memory stick… and it worked! I found an old 128MB SD card, formatted it as FAT32, and I can now transfer files between my Mac and the Iyonix. So I have started by backing up all the Sibelius 7 files. That’s a big relief, because the Iyonix seems to be on its last legs. The fan makes a terrible noise and the hard disk doesn’t always seem to start when the machine boots up; it sometimes needs a couple of tries.

I also tried copying Sibelius itself onto my Mac, where I have RPCemu. I didn’t really expect this to work — I am sure app installation is more complicated than just moving the app file/folder, and Sibelius has copy-protection too. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work at all. Getting Sibelius to run under emulation on my Mac looks like a tall order.

So back to my fallback plan. The background here is that the Iyonix machine used to belong to a Cambridge musicologist, now deceased, who created parts (in Sibelius 7) for lots of old music (mostly baroque, it seems) for which no modern parts exist. A music library is keen to preserve his work, but that means getting it off the machine. My father, who originally took on this task, was doing so by printing each page and then scanning it in. That seemed rather laborious to me (there are hundreds of pages) so my plan now is to install print-to-PDF software, print everything as PDFs, export to a modern computer and then send by email to the library.

You may ask why we are not simply importing the Sibelius files into a more recent version of Sibelius on another machine. Apparently this has been tried, and newer versions of the program (it’s 3.x on this machine) lose all the slurs/phrasing marks, which are absolutely vital. (If anyone has a working version of Sibelius, though, I’d be happy to check that this is the case. Is anyone out there still running it?)

My next task, then, is to install PrintPDF, which seems to require GhostScript. I hope they will run on 5.13; if not I will have to update the OS.

I’ve made some progress

Thats good to hear.

There are no other file-transfer clients that I can see

If the machine is still on 5.13 then it will not have some of the more up to date addons.

You can get an free more capable Samba client, LanMan98 that will allow you to see files on a Windows PC, subject to it being still on SMB version 1, and a free browser , Netsurf
that can access a lot of sites thoughit is not fully feature rich.

LanMan98 and other applications can be downloaded for free via Store

The fact you can see the a SDCard via the SDCard reader does point to perhaps the USBStick being hidden.

This was achieved via a little Basic program called MakeHide that can be found in the Utlities.USB-Mass directory on the hard drive.

Once run and configured a file was placed in !Boot.Choices.SCSIFS.Hide so perhaps have a look to see if it is present and stopping the USB stick/drive being seen.

Alternatively there was another Application called HideSCSI , by Colin Granville, that could be configured to hide SCSI devices like USB Sticks/Drives etc and the configuration set up element can be accessed via getting to the Configuration window, double mouse select button on !Boot, and look for HideSCSI and run that if it is present and alter as required.

Hope all goes well with PrintPDF which is a real valuable application to share stuff with other Operating systems.

Thank you — I should have said that I checked the various SCSI-hiding possibilities and those files were empty. So that was not to blame for the non-appearance of USB sticks, as far as I can tell.

Well, I installed (or think I installed) GhostScript and PrintPDF, but it turns out I don’t need them — I can just print to a PostScript file on the Iyonix and then convert to resulting files to PDF on my Mac. So I’m doing that.

Victory is mine! Thank you all for your help this week.

One final thing. When printing to a file, is there a way to have each file numbered successively, eg Printout1, Printout2 etc? At the moment I am renaming output files by hand.