"Imaging" a MFM drive?

Joachim Thiemann wrote: [...] There are a few things I'd be worried about here... - You need to know what parameters were used when formatting the drive. Usually these will be the ones printed on the drive label (or in the instruction book) but sometimes e.g. the cylinder count is reduced to get around bad cylinders, and so on. - As it's an 8-bit card, it should work fine in a 16-bit ISA slot. Problem is, it may well conflict with the motherboard's onboard IDE controller (if it has one, which is likely). At the very least you'll need to configure the Xebec card as a secondary controller, then turn off the secondary IDE controller in the BIOS. It's still in the 2.6 kernel source... No idea if it works, but in any case you'll probably have to build a custom kernel to use it (I'll bet most Linux distros won't compile it in by default). Should do. Worst case, pull the EPROM chip or flip the ROM_DISABLE jumper. $ su - # dd if=/dev/hd(whatever the Xebec comes up as) of=/root/hdd_image Then copy hdd_image off onto another (faster) machine for processing. That'll give you a raw dump of the contents of the drive. Then you just have to figure out the partitioning and data structure (even/odd word storage, and so on)... It should be possible to search the drive image block-by-block to find the Amiga FS superblock -- you can certainly do it for FAT{12,16,32} and the Linux Extfs variants because there's static data in the superblock. -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/