Fdutils

fdutils@fdutils.linux.lu

80 discussions

Minor mail list problem
by Martin Gregorie 14 Oct '12

14 Oct '12

The address on the http://www.fdutils.linux.lu/mailing.html web page for subscribing by e-mail: fdutils-request(a)tux.org bounced when I tried it a few minutes ago, though the web-based signup worked OK. Please fix this address. Regards, Martin Gregorie

1 0

Reading an entire floppy
by digitek 17 Jun '12

17 Jun '12

Hi, I've been trying to create a floppy image of an old DOS game (Return of Werdna) and been using fdutils (fdrawcmd) to attempt the creation. I am using the commands below to read each track from the floppy and write out the data to an image file. The problem I'm having is that if I tell fdrawcmd the length to read is 4608 (9 sectors * 512 bytes), I get a full 720KB (737280 bytes) in my image file, however fdrawcmd tells me each read has "remaining=512". If I use length=4096, then I get "remaining=0" however my resulting image file is only 655360 bytes - a full 160 sectors shy of the entire disk. It seems I'm missing an entire sector from each track and side of the disk. Any thoughts? The output may be helpful, but too long to include here so put it on pastebin (http://pastebin.com/EZEV8YeY). --------------------------------------- #!/bin/bash TRACKS=80 OUT=/tmp/img for ((i=0; i < $TRACKS; i++)) do phead=0 track=$i lcyl=$i rate=2 lhead=0 secnr=1 secsize=2 nrsect=0 length=4096 # first head fdrawcmd read $phead $lcyl $lhead $secnr $secsize $nrsect 0x1b 0xff length=$length rate=$rate need_seek track=$track >> $OUT # second head phead=4 lhead=1 fdrawcmd read $phead $lcyl $lhead $secnr $secsize $nrsect 0x1b 0xff length=$length rate=$rate need_seek track=$track >> $OUT done -- digitek(a)charter.net key id: 0xF6FA6D1E

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Floppy controller question
by Mark Hounschell 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

Many recent motherboards do not have floppy ports. Does anyone know of a pci floppy controller other than the catweasle card? I've searched and searched to no avail. Thanks Mark

4 8

Question about how to identify floppy format ("http://fdutils.linux.lu/disk-id.html")
by Mark Hounschell 24 Feb '11

24 Feb '11

" Finding out the data transfer rate First, you need to find out the data transfer rate (roughly the density: high, double, single). For this, you try out fdrawcmd readid 0 rate=x, where x is 0, 1, 2, 3 If no rate is supplied, fdrawcmd assumes rate=0 " My question: How do the numbers 0,1,2, and 3 relate to the densities of high, double, and single? There are 4 numbers and only 2 densities. Thanks Mark

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Re: [Fdutils] Question about how to identify floppy format
by John Elliott 23 Feb '11

23 Feb '11

> My question: How do the numbers 0,1,2, and 3 relate to the densities of > high, double, and single? There are 4 numbers and only 2 densities. <http://fdutils.linux.lu/Fdutils.html> explains: dtr-code rate for FM rate for MFM ============================================= 0 250kb/s 500kb/s 1 150kb/s 300kb/s 2 125kb/s 250kb/s 3 500kb/s 1000kb/s "Single Density" is MFM, 125 kb/s. "Double Density" and "quad Density" are MFM, 250 kb/s. "High Density" is MFM at 500kb/s. The 300kb/s rate (number 1) is used on 8" drives and 1.2Mb 5.25" drives, and the 1000kb/s rate (number 3) on 2.8Mb drives. -- John Elliott

1 0

R/W 8" drives, 128 byte sectors, aka CP/M disks?
by Nick Papadonis 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Hi Folks, Does anyone know if this has been completed or attempted? Something similar to what DOS ImageDisk or 22DISK does? I would like to interface my 8" floppy drives to a modern Linux box for imaging. Insight is appreciated. Please reply directly as I'm not subscribed to this mailing list yet. Thanks, Nick

4 4

Reading dodgy old HD 5.25" disks
by Ian Oliver 17 Jan '11

17 Jan '11

> Will fdrawcmd let me ignore CRCs and just got whatever is there? Hmmm, some sniffing around suggests that these disks have a proprietary format. The first cylinder is normal, but after that, the next 21 cylinders don't even have a sector 0. I suspect there are 14 sectors of non-standard sizes, so this is all going to be great fun. Regards Ian

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Re: [Fdutils] Reading dodgy old HD 5.25" disks
by John Elliott 16 Jan '11

16 Jan '11

> What system were they from? That might be helpful to list readers (or yield > someone with a working system that can read them "natively") > > > The first cylinder is normal, but after that, the next 21 cylinders don't > > even have a sector 0. If the discs were formatted with a WD17xx series controller, it's possible that the first sector is too close to the index hole for the PC's floppy controller to detect. <http://z80cpu.eu/archive/news/comp.os.cpm/threads/49581d115e7ce5d6.html> <http://simonowen.com/samdisk/faq/> -- John Elliott

2 2

Reading dodgy old HD 5.25" disks
by Ian Oliver 11 Jan '11

11 Jan '11

Hi, I have some old (20 years+) floppies that I'm trying to read. ddrescue has got the good sectors off, so now I need to work on the problem cases. Will fdrawcmd let me ignore CRCs and just got whatever is there? Is there any way to play with things like precomp? Lots of my disks are OK at the start but hard to read at the end. Any/all advice is very welcome. Regards Ian

1 0

Cannot format floppies under kernel 2.6.*?
by ael 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

Running linux with kernel 2.6.3* (2.6.32-rc6, for example) on a couple of i386 boxes and an amd64 box, I cannot format floppies or do any low level operations like dd direct to /dev/fd0. I can read and write to floppies already containing file systems. This is on debian testing, although I doubt if that is relevant. I can format floppies under a 2.4.* kernel on an old i386 running an ancient redhat release. I have found no similar reports of such problems, but perhaps not many people still use floppies. fdformat (I realize that is not part of fdutils), gfloppy (ditto) and superformat all fail. (Once gfloppy seemed to have succeeded, but I was not able to replicate that success.) CRC errors are logged to /var/log/messages. More details including strace on superformat are here:- http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=548434 Can anyone help or suggest how to investigate further? Can people here format floppies under 2.6.3* kernels? Thanks in advance for any help, ael

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