ImageDisk project is canceled

I think you're comparing Apples and IBMs here :-). It is one thing to expect _you_ to make changes to your program (and that arguably should be charged for), it's another to want to make those changes themselves... Are you seriously suggesting you think that the Internet would be better if everything was charged for? No free downloads of old manuals like on bitsavers, for example (somebody spent time scanning those, converting them to pdf, etc). No free schematics on hpmuseum.net (I spent hundreds, no make that thousands. of hours drawing those out), etc. I have written a few (OK, very few) utilities, and have never charged for any of them, and nor do I ever intend to. Next time somebody here asks for a sevice manual, or a schematic, or a pinout, or... I will not bother to look it up for them. I will simply point out that you can deduce the necessary information from the machine, them) and a few hours with a mulitmeter. I won't bother pointing out useful repair tricks, it took me time to discrover them, why should I help you. So now you're claiming that all users of linux and *BSD are plagarists. Yes, I will admit I've used ideas from open-source programs in my own programs. Yes, I will also admit that I've looked at published schematics and thought 'hey, that's a neat trick to save a few ns of delay', and used something similar in my own design. If the trick is significant, it gets an acknowledgement of the form 'Using a mux to decode the signals {foo...barr} was inspired by the DEC KT11-C schematic' That, IMHO, is a far cry from ripping off somebody's work. Or do you want to re-invent the wheel every time. Can any programmer or electronic designer honestly claim to have never read somebody else's code/schematics and taken ideas from it? Because I would doubt it. To get back to disk imaging, I may be stupid, but I do wonder if it's actually possible to write such a program to run under linux or any other multi-tasking system. It is relatively easy to write a program to dump an image back to a physical disk. I've done similar things several times for specific disk formats (in particular TRS-80 M2/M4 and HP LIF). To do the reverse -- to imagge a disk _once the format is known_ is also easy. The problem comes with discovering the format. I've read and re-read the 8272 and 765 data sheets. From what I can see the only way to see what sectors are on the current track is to use the ReadID command. This returns the ID bytes from the next sector header to pass under the head. There is no way to automatically dump all the IDs from all the sectors please enlighten me). On a single-tasking OS, you could submit another ReadID command as soon as you get the reuslts from the current one, and keep on going until you read the same ID again. That way you will hopefully have read all the headers on a track (hope you don't miss any ;-)). On a multi-tasking machine it seems to be hopeless. Your task could be switched out during this operation, you will then miss some sectors, you will not discover all the IDs. If I am missing something, please enlighten me (point me to the appropriate section of the Intel or NEC datasheets, for example. I have both). If not, then why did nobody point this out <n> days ago, in which case this whole flamefest could have been seriously reduced. -tony