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
Nick Papadonis wrote:
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
Fdutils mailing list Fdutils@fdutils.linux.lu https://fdutils.linux.lu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fdutils
Hi all,
please forward any solution to this group, too. I'm also interested in this question, especially considering the hardware solution!
Regards,
Uwe.
Nick Papadonis wrote:
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.
Are you talking hard-sectored 8" media or soft?
I don't think there's any magic involved in the latter, other than making a suitable cable and providing power - the ability to handle 128 byte sectors seems to be solely down to the FDC, with some better than others (many won't touch 128 byte reads, let alone writes).
It's been a while since I've played with the Imagedisk source, but I don't remember there being anything specific to handling 8" drives - maybe your best approach is to boot Imagedisk from a floppy and get that going first; once you're happy that the hardware's functional you can worry about the Linux side.
Aside: I did do some testing for Dave trying to get Imagedisk running in an emulated DOS environment under Linux, but I seem to remember there was some fundamental issue (DMA not working quite right, or interrupts not being passed on). I never tried with a full VM environment, though (e.g. VMWare, Virtualbox etc.)
cheers
Jules
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Jules Richardson < julesrichardsonuk@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Nick Papadonis wrote:
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.
Are you talking hard-sectored 8" media or soft?
I don't think there's any magic involved in the latter, other than making a suitable cable and providing power - the ability to handle 128 byte sectors seems to be solely down to the FDC, with some better than others (many won't touch 128 byte reads, let alone writes).
It's been a while since I've played with the Imagedisk source, but I don't remember there being anything specific to handling 8" drives - maybe your best approach is to boot Imagedisk from a floppy and get that going first; once you're happy that the hardware's functional you can worry about the Linux side.
Aside: I did do some testing for Dave trying to get Imagedisk running in an emulated DOS environment under Linux, but I seem to remember there was some fundamental issue (DMA not working quite right, or interrupts not being passed on). I never tried with a full VM environment, though (e.g. VMWare, Virtualbox etc.)
Soft sectored. I have hard sectored drives, but I'm not sure a controller in modern PC could handle them. I only have the spec for a WD 179x FDC used on pre-PC systems. Does anyone know where the modern PC FDC spec is?
I'll try out the known to work tools first and if time (and when I have the correct data sheets), will try testing out the Linux interface.
Thanks
In article AANLkTikd5XxdvyPAPeOETj1DGT38O-R=okFJHHhOCVHf@mail.gmail.com, Nick Papadonis wrote:
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.
You could try asking amigakit.com if the "CATWEASEL MK4 PLUS" will work with 8" drives. I recently used one with the open source cw2dmk utility to get some very corrupted data off some old 5.25" drives.
With some judicious editing of the cw2dmk source, and a few hundred lines of Python, I got every last sector.
Regards
Ian
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Ian Oliver -
Jules Richardson -
Nick Papadonis -
Uwe Nass