4 Dec
2006
4 Dec
'06
3:42 a.m.
As a several boxes of floppy disks slipped and fell,
the question occurred ...
if you have a disk with only a vague idea of what computer it might go to, is
there an easy way to find out what computer made it without trying it in a
number of systems? Is Teledisk or Dave's program likely to be useful? And what
about Apple disks?
And to make it "easy", assume the disks all look like soft-sector disks.
If ImageDisk or TeleDisk will read it, then you at least know it's an FM or MFM
format (not Apple, Commodore etc.).
Assuming that ImageDisk will read it, then you could scan the image file for
copyright notices etc. It might be slightly easier if you use ImageDisk Utility
to convert it to a raw binary file (remove track/sector headers etc.).
Use a hex editor and do a case insensitive search for "COPYRI" and
"(C)"
also, just scroll through the first few tracks and see if you can identfy any
text with clues. Most OS's and many programs will have startup messages
identifying the system on which they run.
If you cannot see ANY text, then the code on the disk may not be in ASCII
(unlikely) or may use a different encoding - try inverting all the data bytes
and see if that turns up anything useful.
Q for all: Would it be worth building a HEX viewer into ImageDisk so that
you could look at track content without having to read the disk into a file
first?
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html