15 Jun
2003
15 Jun
'03
1:50 p.m.
I've got disks for the following machines which
I'd like to initially back up:
Acorn BBC / BBC Master / Cambridge Workstation (I believe these are all the
same low-level format even if filesystem structure is different)
Original BBC micros used a 8271 disk controller chip which is
single-density (FM) only. Many PC disk controllers can't handle that.
Later, Acorn used the 1770 (which can do double desinty (MFM) _as well_),
but still used single density recording as the standard.
DEC Rainbow (B model, if there's a difference
between that and the A)
That one is possible, there are shareware MS-DOS programs for this
(probably different for Rainbow CP/M and MS-DOS disks). The Rainbow disks
(RX50 drive) are are 80 cylinder single sided, so you need a 1.2M drive.
Apple (Apple ][, //e and /// - again I believe low-level structure is the
same for all 3?)
Apple used GCR encoding on these machines, which can't be handled by
_any_ standard PC disk controller.
-tony