Fdutils June 2013

fdutils@fdutils.linux.lu

4 participants
2 discussions

Thanks a lot, guys
by Patrick Serru 26 Jul '13

26 Jul '13

Hello All, A French proverb says, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." The statement is a bit silly, but the semantics is telling the truth. I traveled a lot and therefore did not "keep" a lot (nor won much anyway). I thought I had thrown everything, related to a micro computer based on the MC6801, entirely designed and produced by me, and animated by Flex2. But no! I did not have throw the cards, and even kept some floppies! These disks are dated from 1985 - 1986. And having them found, I wanted to retrieve the contents. I spoke to the ancients always addicted to Flex, which told me that the PC could read only the disks whose sectors are 512 bytes. But I am still hitched looking for a 5.25 "drive, and I ended up found. Tonight, I finally begin to create images of these disks. I'm happy and considers should thank you all. Even if the Developer(s) at the origin of "fdutils" is not (are not) listening to this list, the listeners whom I have read some answers, did realy help me. So here: thank you, thank you and thank you. Patrick

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fdutils for OS/9 256 sector disks
by Martin Gregorie 07 Jun '13

07 Jun '13

Some time back my 68000-based OS/9 system died and I needed to get stuff off the 3.5" floppies I use to back it up. I'm a Linux user, so I used setfdprm to fiddle with the parameters in the 'floppy' driver and was able to image the disks successfully and then use the os9exec OS/9 emulator to access their contents. The reason I'm mentioning this is that I used a standard Linux driver, which normally uses 512b blocks and a standard 3.5" drive to read OS/9 floppies while the parameters needed to read the OS/9 floppies were: hd sect=34 ssize=256 head=2 cyl=80 tracksize=8704 dtr=0 zerobased I haven't yet tried it on any Flex-09 disks: mine all use single density for track zero and deduce the format of the other tracks from its contents. I wrote the drivers and may have diddled with the formatter when I replaced the original two disk FD card with a Windrush card that that handles 4 drives off a pair of FDC chips. I'm posting this to say thanks for writing such a good "get out of jail free" utility and as an indication to any other Linux users of just what setfdprm is capable of. Martin

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Fdutils June 2013