floppy imaging

tony wrote: 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). -- Look at the readfloppy code in Eric's DMK library http://dmklib.brouhaha.com/ It is capable of detecting sector length automagicly under Linux.