23 Jan
1999
23 Jan
'99
4:18 a.m.
On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Tony Duell wrote:
kernel sources I've got, and plenty of 'em. (I'm thinking seriously about
trying 2.2.0-final, for the SCSI driver fixes--maybe the MTIOCGET ioctl() will
see EOD and EOT now.)
I've been thinking about trying to use my Microtech 8" drive unit, which is
attached to a fairly standard FDC, to read IBM 3740-format (Sys/23, Sys/36,
Displaywriter, etc.) diskettes from Linux. I did some reading on 'fdutils' and
found one brief mention of 8" diskettes, but nothing really useful, for obvious
reasons I guess. Has anyone tried this or anything like it on Linux?
I have never tried hooking up an 8" drive, but I have used the FDRAWCMD
ioctl() call to read and write alien disks on this linux box.
This ioctl() is almost undocumented. The best way to figure out how to
use it is to read the kernel sources, and have the Intel data book
handy. All I can say is that when you have worked it out, it's a lot
easier to handle alien disks under linux than under MS-DOS (I did that
once, and it drove me even more insane...)
If I get a chance I'll throw together a text file documenting the
parameters to FDRAWCMD so that at least you don't have to do the same
hacking that I did.