Defining Disk Image Dump Standard

Adding Jim Willing's input to the fray: 1. Host computer type (2 bytes allowing up to 65536 models to be specified) 2. Hard/soft sector flag 3. Number of tracks 4. Track format (host computer specific) 5. Sector format (single-density, double-density, etc) 5. Sector data format - this will specify what format the archived sector is in (raw data? logical bytes?) 6. Sectors per track 7. Bytes per sector 8. Bits per byte I think the measure of usefulness of this standard will be if it can easily define the format of a standard disk from most any platform as well as being able to handle different exceptions. What I mean is, can one take a regularly formatted diskette from any computer that has T number of tracks and S number of sectors per track and B number of bytes per sector and describe it with the same header as a disk with some totally hardware specific formatting? The Archive Description Header should be able to easily describe standard disk formats so as to be easily implementable across multiple platforms, while also being powerful enough to describe exotic platform specific formats that would allow reconstruction of an original disk back to the original platform. The reading and writing of the disks will obviously have to be done with applications running on the actual hardware, that will be able to analyze the format of the disk and pass information about any special formatting to the machine where the archive is to be processed and stored. We are NOT creating a description for hardware that can read any disk format ever put out. That is wholly unfeasible. We are creating a software standard that will allow the contents of a diskette to be universally defined in a manner that allows complete reconstruction of a diskette on the original platform. So for disks that cannot be read by PC hardware (which is what I currently consider to be "universal") utilities will have to be created on the original platform to both read and write the diskette. The best example would be the Apple ][. A utility will have to be written for the Apple ][ that can read the raw disk data, analyze the contents, and return the sector (or track) data back to the "universal" host over a serial port along with a description of how that data was formatted on the disk. That description will then get encoded into the Archive Description Header. Which leads me to this thought: is preserving the actual format of the disk even necessary for posterity? Is the goal here to be able to make exact copies of the disk to be able to run on the hardware well into the future? Or is the actual data itself more important? This is getting too complicated, but what I mean is, instead of trying to archive an oddball format from, say, the Apple ][ that was designed to thwart copying of the disk and making archiving it a challenge, would it be better to just take the software contained on that disk and convert it to a standard format that can be more easily archived? Is there historical value to preserving the original format? I think so. Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a six in a pile of nines... Coming soon: VCF 4.0! VCF East: Planning in Progress See http://www.vintage.org for details!