29 Jan
2012
29 Jan
'12
11:37 a.m.
[Treating the 2 sides of a DS floppy as separate 'drives']
It'd be interesting to know how common that kind
of setup was. Most floppy
It wasn;'t uncommon at one time. The RML380Z did it IIRC (I think C: and
D: were the flip sides of A: and B: respectively). I've seen other
machines that do it too, but the neames don't instantly spring to mind).
When I added a double-sided 3" (not 3.5") drive to my CoCo (all those
years ago...), I added a lit little bit of hardware (a couple of TTL ICs)
to allow the drive to appearr either as a sdouble-sided drive 1 (using
the Side Select line in the normal way) or a a pair of single-sided
drives 1 and 2. The ROM-based OS used iwth BASIC could onlt handle the
latter, OS-9 could work with either (but woe betide me if I set the
switch wrongkly, I would end up wit ha corrupted filesystem on the disk).
image formats seem to expect there to just be one
'thing' on a disc (i.e.
the floppy is either single-sided, or double-sided with the filesystem
spanning the whole disk), and metadata can only be attached to the image as
a whole.
Isn't the solution to image the 2 sides sparately as single-sided disks?
-tony