16 Oct
2002
16 Oct
'02
8:38 p.m.
> There are numerous such errors on that page,
although overall the content
> is good.
On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
I was only paying attention to the parts that showed
how to use the
commands, I wasn't really paying attention to it in that much detail, I
guess.
And, of course, the part that I paid most attention to was the discussion
of floppy disk formats.
I'm not trying to make a miracle data-transfer
agent like XenoCopy (I mean
that as a complement), just something to let me make images to transfer
over a network or store as files on a hard drive somewhere.
If you're not trying to make sense of files, etc., then only the physical
parameters matter.
I would read the sector headers, which would give you all that you need.
But you CAN check whether a format has the parameters that you expect with
just a series of sector reads.
I think I'm the somebody that you're talking
about. If I had a bulk
eraser lying around, that'd probably be helpful.
It would certainly help prevent left over extraneous formatting from
confusing the "recognizer".
For example, some HP 3.5" formats use 77 tracks. If you take an old used
PC 720K and reformat it with the HP, it won't erase the extraneous stuff
on the top 3 tracks, thus fooling the recognizer into thinking that it's
looking at an 80 track format.
Thanks for the help, I'm thinking I'll try to
just play around with a
manual selection of disk format (chose from a list or enter the parameters
manually) for now. I'd just like to get something to play with first.
And of course, it'd be nice to have something that'll convert/read
teledisk format files, so I don't have any reason to worry about having to
use this DOS box sitting next to be to write out disks anymore.
What I did in early XenoCopy was to have a list of format names, that
loaded their parameters. Undocumented format #0 took you to a series of
prompts to input the values. My publisher insisted on opening that for
public use, which resulted in an unacceptable amount of support ("What
parameters do I put in to do hard sectored and Apple disks?")
Good luck,
--
Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com