[jaimeeduardo]

Hi, i have a bridgeport torq cut 30 whit damaged software, does anyone have the recovery files to make it work again?

[machintek]

First. What mass storage media are you using. Some had hard drives. Some had flash cards. Makes a big difference.
The flash card did not get the full DOS, not enough room.

George

[jaimeeduardo]

is the flashdisk 8mb card, i have no way to read it, i tried to read it in some old computer, but it only appears as m-system card in the boot up sequence, but once in full dos, i cant acces it to program something or try to read something of it.

I found some old backup software yesterday, but i dont have the bmdc.bin file, nor the bmdc.zip file. Any help would help

[machintek]

When using a flash card, the C drive or primary master is set to none. The flash card has software that emulates a hard drive.
Bridgeport service techs carried a special floppy disk from M-Systems that was bootable and would re-initialize a flash card. There was one fault with it. You could not lock the floppy, thus a virus could create a catch 22 situation. With some boot sector viruses, I heard that flash cards were just replaced. The floppy would boot three times in the course of resurrecting the flash card and write to its own autoexec.bat moving it to the next task. Then the machine software was installed. This flash card had jumpers at one end. They were set to work with a mother board. Typically there were only 2 motherboards specified to work with it.
You could replace the flash card with a hard drive.

George

[NC Cams]

If you do replace the card with a HDD, make sure you format the HDD properly. SOME of the Bridgeport machine software(s) could NOT use just ANY size HDD.

[jaimeeduardo]

hi, i cant access the flashdisk from the dos prompt, and i dont find a way to format it, i tried to replace the flashcard with a hdd, but today hdd are too big for this 486. could a hdd partition work? can i make a 10meg hdd partition and forget the rest of a 10gig hdd?. And still, were can i find the rest of the software for the machine?

Thanks

[machintek]

How are you getting to DOS? The machine must boot from the flash card to load its software, otherwise you will not access it unless you have the Msystem utilities on a floppy..
All you need to do is FDISK the hard drive to 508 MB. Make sure CMOS is set the same way. Then load DOS, and the machine software and parameters. If you use generic parameters, you will need to set tool change height and orient, spindle speeds, shift points (if gear box present), etc.

George

[jaimeeduardo]

I get to dos whit a booteable floppy disk, if i try to boot from the flashdisk it tell me NO SYSTEM DISK OR BOOT ERROR (or semething like that). I am sure that the fdisk remedy will work, but still having the problem whit the software.

[NC Cams]

If, perhaps, the motherboard is going awry, you may be unable to find the HDD/flash disk. If it is the OEM M/B, this could be your problem. We had similar bizarre problems when our M/B started going south. Perhaps it is time to invest in a new M/B. Be careful. Some of the BMDC based systems can not use just ANY PC M/B - supposedly, the BMDC's generally had a 133mhz M/B speed limit.

Question: if you install an 8gig HDD (max size readable by DOS and the BMDC is a pure DOS program), can you partition it so the C:\ drive is 508mb and D thru whatever are there to use for other DOS stuff??

This would retain the 508mb threshold that the BPT software wants/needs and leaves the rest for storage or other computer files/stuff.

[machintek]

Even using later BIOS without the 508MB limit, I could only create 3 partitions, each of 2 GB in size, using DOS 6.20. I tried this quite a few years ago. It may no longer be valid.

George