I have not tried it (don't have FD installed anywhere), however I don't see why it would not - as long as FD leaves the FDC alone when it's not accessing it it should be OK (I access the FDC by direct manipulation - the only DOS functions I use specifically relating to the FDC are get/set the interrupt vector, and the only BIOS function I use is "reset disk system" which I do just before I exit). Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Vintage computing equipment collector.

Indeed I haven't looked into the gory details, however I expect that "HAL" just virtualizes an FDC and translates it's operations to the standard Win28 floppy driver - which means it works only as long as you don't configure the FDC in any way that the Win2k driver does not. I also wouldn't trust the virtualization to be "wonderful" in terms of real-time emulation (for example, I've seen the virtual serial port of the XP dosbox take up to 10 seconds to report a character received (needless to say this breaks lots of stuff). Under DOS, I take over the interrupt, and since I alone am controlling the FDC, I only get interrupts I expect - under Win2k, I expect you can't get a "real" interrupt vector (only a virtual one), and diddling with the chip may cause Win2k to see an interrupt and go poking around on it's own ... Are you sure? - you might have a "spare" processor, but what I was really getting at is "an OS that doesn't decide not to dispatch you for a while". I'm not convinced you can guarantee this under any flavor/configuration of winblows. I'd respond with a photo of my basement (all the machines depicted on my web site are there) - needless to say, they are not all set up and accessable at the same time (can you say "optimized for storage")! Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Vintage computing equipment collector.

Rumor has it that Roger Merchberger may have mentioned these words: Yea, I are schizophrenic... ;-) A DOS-bootable USB key would be really neat for IMD; but if not, if anyone (like me) has Norton Ghost 2003, it will build a boot-floppy with both USB & Firewire drivers. Boot from floppy, IMD on either firewire drive, USB key or drive, make images anywhere you want... Doesn't sound like a half-bad idear, eh? [1] One question: Can IMD deal with FAT32 partitions? (As in, if DOS gives it a drive letter, can IMD write an image file to it?) Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] Dave - I am not making fun of the fact you're Canadian. I've lived most of my life in northern Michigan on the Canadian border (The light from the Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario skyline gives me enough ambient light to navigate my bedroom - that's *how* close... ;-) so I say eh? too. ;-) Oh, and my mom's mom was raised in Kentucky, so I say y'all and thang too. ;^> -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | A new truth in advertising slogan SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy... zmerch at 30below.com | ...in oxymoron!"

Rumor has it that dave04a at dunfield.com may have mentioned these words: Santa might be a little late on this one, but he just might have something popped into your private inbox here shortly... ;-) Kewl. That's good to hear. ;-) Thanks again, Dave! Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | A new truth in advertising slogan SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy... zmerch at 30below.com | ...in oxymoron!"

Most PC FDC's are limited in their ability to access formats not native to the PC - This is not a limitation of the ImageDisk program, it is a limitation of the FDC implemented on most PC's. I've heard from a few people that the Adaptec cards work well. I've had good luck personally with the FDCs on both of the Intel Mainboards that I have, as well as one Aopen board (although all the other Aopen boards I've tried don't fare so well). Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Vintage computing equipment collector.

On 1/10/2006 at 5:16 PM Nico de Jong wrote: You know, many of the "Floppy Tape" QIC backup accelerator cards are nothing more than floppy controllers running on non-standard (i.e. not 3Fx, IRQ 6, DMA 2) ports. At most, replacing the crystal is necessary. Observations about the floppy interface in NT/2K/XP are accurate. The native floppy driver is hard-wired to expect Microsoft-format floppies, even to having the boot sector information being critical. (Try clobbering a boot sector and then reading an otherwise valid diskette--you'll get a general failure). Sydex has quietly made a tidy side business of licensing a kernel mode floppy driver for NT and 2K/XP (in addittion to Win9x VxDs) to firms needing CP/M (using a DLL interface) or other direct access (driver access) to "alien" diskette types. We're currently working on a Vista driver. Operations like "sync to the index hole and read a bunch of IDs nonstop" are atomic functions with the driver. While this will keep most of our customers happy for the short term, I expect that floppy-less Windows PCs will shortly become the rule. We're actively investigating the possibility of a USB add-on floppy drive that will be able to handle most formats. I also anticipate that FDC chips will become rare birds, so implementation of some sort of FDC through software of FPGA would seem to be the wise course. I've investigated downloading special firmware into floppy USB chips, such as that used on the Teac FD-05U, but Teac has not been forthcoming on the controller chip details being used in any particular model. Cheers, Chuck

I expect that Linux would have similar issues. Basically any OS which uses protected mode will likely disallow application program direct access to system resources, and not expect interrupts to be generated from elsewhere. Any general purpose multiprocessing OS, will likely have issues with real-time critical operations as well. I was corresponding with someone trying to get ImageDisk running DOSemu a while ago, and ran into some of these issues. I pointed out at that time that the only "proper" way to do a program like this under Linix or any other "real" OS would be to put the analysis function and flexibility to read foreign formats into the floppy driver, where you do have direct access to the hardware, and each phase/operation can be initiated in hard real-time by the interrupt generated by the completion of the previous phase ... this is exactly what Chuck is describing with regard to his enhanced drivers. -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:07:15 -0500 "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at blazenet.net> wrote: My feeling on the matter is that when a computer is being used to image and/or salvage data off of non-native disks, it is being used as a piece of test equipment, not as a general purpose computer. As such, it's 'legitimate' to run it as root, dig deep into the driver hierarchy and kernel, etc. A lot of the real power of a diskette imaging/analyzing system will be deep within the system. So making distinctions between 'user space' and 'kernel space' might be interesting, but ultimately are irrelevant. A piece of test equipment is designed for a specific purpose, and a computer repurposed to something like this will be as well.

AFAIK linux does do this already. Bsically, there is an ioctl() call that lets you sent any sequence of command bytes to the disk controller. The linux driver (not your program) takes care of selecting the drive, controlling the motor, and setting up the DMA controller (you tell it how many bytes to transfer and give a pointer to the buffer you want them put in, Linux takes care of the 64K boundary problem on ISA machines, etc). I think that should be veratile enough. Certainly I've never found a disk that can't be read/written using this call if the hardware is capable of it. OK, the tricks of swithcing between drives mid-sector, or pulsing the motor line in an attempt to control the speed won't work, but I don't think Imagedisk uses those. Yes, you would have to add that. It is too time-critical to do in user-space. -tony

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 2:09 pm, Dave Dunfield wrote: Just a quick check of devices.txt show these floppy formats currently supported on a stock SuSE install 0 = /dev/fd? Autodetect format 4 = /dev/fd?d360 5.25" 360K in a 360K drive(1) 20 = /dev/fd?h360 5.25" 360K in a 1200K drive(1) 48 = /dev/fd?h410 5.25" 410K in a 1200K drive 64 = /dev/fd?h420 5.25" 420K in a 1200K drive 24 = /dev/fd?h720 5.25" 720K in a 1200K drive 80 = /dev/fd?h880 5.25" 880K in a 1200K drive(1) 8 = /dev/fd?h1200 5.25" 1200K in a 1200K drive(1) 40 = /dev/fd?h1440 5.25" 1440K in a 1200K drive(1) 56 = /dev/fd?h1476 5.25" 1476K in a 1200K drive 72 = /dev/fd?h1494 5.25" 1494K in a 1200K drive 92 = /dev/fd?h1600 5.25" 1600K in a 1200K drive(1) 12 = /dev/fd?u360 3.5" 360K Double Density(2) 16 = /dev/fd?u720 3.5" 720K Double Density(1) 120 = /dev/fd?u800 3.5" 800K Double Density(2) 52 = /dev/fd?u820 3.5" 820K Double Density 68 = /dev/fd?u830 3.5" 830K Double Density 84 = /dev/fd?u1040 3.5" 1040K Double Density(1) 88 = /dev/fd?u1120 3.5" 1120K Double Density(1) 28 = /dev/fd?u1440 3.5" 1440K High Density(1) 124 = /dev/fd?u1600 3.5" 1600K High Density(1) 44 = /dev/fd?u1680 3.5" 1680K High Density(3) 60 = /dev/fd?u1722 3.5" 1722K High Density 76 = /dev/fd?u1743 3.5" 1743K High Density 96 = /dev/fd?u1760 3.5" 1760K High Density 116 = /dev/fd?u1840 3.5" 1840K High Density(3) 100 = /dev/fd?u1920 3.5" 1920K High Density(1) 32 = /dev/fd?u2880 3.5" 2880K Extra Density(1) 104 = /dev/fd?u3200 3.5" 3200K Extra Density 108 = /dev/fd?u3520 3.5" 3520K Extra Density 112 = /dev/fd?u3840 3.5" 3840K Extra Density(1) 36 = /dev/fd?CompaQ Compaq 2880K drive; obsolete? (1) Autodetectable format (2) Autodetectable format in a Double Density (720K) drive only (3) Autodetectable format in a High Density (1440K) drive only NOTE: The letter in the device name (d, q, h or u) signifies the type of drive: 5.25" Double Density (d), 5.25" Quad Density (q), 5.25" High Density (h) or 3.5" (any model, u). Filesystem support is another matter.

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 02:27 pm, Dave Dunfield wrote: Heh. There are three monitors on my desk, four machines above it on the "second level" I built when things started getting tight, and a (seldom-used) monitor sitting on top of those, as well as a couple of printers, a 16-port hub, and two external modems. Then there's another system on another desk as well. If I could figure out where to put more of them in this room I would, but there's two metal shelving units in here, a couple of file cabinets, a wooden shelf, three cardfiles, and way too much other junk. It's possible to walk around the room but you gotta be careful, because there's also 3 full towers and 5 others sitting there as well, plus almost a couple dozen UPSs. :-) I like that idea, but then you gotta buy those things, and I hsve no funds to spend on any computer hardware at this point in time. I have somewhere around here the original IBM card that has the DB37 on the back of it, and may even have a cable, though it's not terribly long -- somewhere I have a box that had a single external half-height floppy and a teeny little switching power supply in it. I may also have some tape drive hardware that was set up with the same connector. Dunno if I have any DB37s around or not, not without looking. The trouble with that IBM card, and some of the other 8-bit cards, is that the board projects down into the area next to the edge connector and it won't plug into an ISA slot, so I'd have to use something a bit older, with an 8-bit slot and no parts in the way. Hmm. :-) I at one time had plans of bringing out the pin headers on my Bigboard II to the front panel, that was gonna be a general purpose test machine, with plugs for both sizes of floppy and a SASI connector as well. I'd planned to use those "Centronics-style" connectors, and may actually even have gotten as far as getting the connectors, I don't recall. Oh yeah, and I had all sorts of power (+5, +12, and even +24 for 8 inch drives as well as 117vac for some 8" spindles) connected to an octal socket on the front panel. Got that covered, already... I have *no* USB hardware here at all yet, though I do have the capability on some of the MBs. I did buy a gizmo that has a slot bracket and the external connectors that plugs into the pin header on the MB, but haven't tried it out with anything yet. What are you using for networking under dos? Best I've been able to do is to load a packet driver (3c509) and then an ftp program, but that at least lets me move stuff around. DOS networking stuff is a mess, as far as what I've encountered so far, with shims, drivers, and assorted specialized bits. People keep pointing me at the m$ stuff, three floppies worth of download and what you end up with after the _install_ process is completed is a whole big honkin' tree full of assorted subdirectories and files, and I'm sure that I don't want to go there. I haven't tried drdos or some of the other stuff that may offer networking features. This would be fine to set up in a workbench computer (assuming that I ever get my workbenches out of storage and have some place to set them up again). But the three machines that are on here currently are on 24/7, I don't shut them down, and I don't reboot them. One's a firewall/router, one's a server, and the other one is this workstation, currently showing an uptime of 72 days and change. Agreed that dos is a good choice for a test bench computer, though, unless I put one of my CP/M boxes back to work. :-) If by chance I should acquire some I'll surely put them to good use... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 05:39 pm, Dave Dunfield wrote: Got one of those, too, only I haven't decided where I might use it just yet. It came along with a bunch of other stuff... Most of my recent acquisitions have been zero cost. Prolonged periods of zero income will do that to you. Heh. Sure. I think I have WFWG around here someplace on floppies. Got one box still running dos, and that's the former BBS machine, which is currently shut off. And it's the only one here currently with a 5.25" drive in it, too. I need to do something about that autoexec.bat going into desqview and firing up the bbs software, though. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

Not sure why this comment came out - the original conversation was specifically about machines capable of running ImageDisk, which would imply PCs. I'm pretty sure the machines and monitors to which I made this comment were PCs (at least this was implied in the thread). Besides Tony, I wouldn't expect you to buy an off the shelf KVM .. but couldn't you build one that could translate between proprietary keyboard interfaces if you wanted one? -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

Simple : Several of us (including myself) don't have space to set up another machine, like a modern PC. You suggested a KVM switch. As I understand it, this is a device that switches a single keyboard, monitor and mouse between 2 machines. But most, if not all, only work for machines which take PC-like keyboards and VGA monitors (forget about the mouse, OK :-)). Which means it wouldn't svce any space here becuase none of the machines on or around my desk use such peripherals. So a KVM switch couldn't be used to share one of the monitors and keyboards with the new PC that runs imagedisk. Oh, I probalby could, but I like to use the original keyboards on my classics... Anyewy, if I am going to go to all that work, I might as well design a disk imaging device, which certainly wouldn't use an 8272 controller. If I used a single chip, it would be one of the WD ones (which have a much more useful read track command). Or I might just make something like a Catweasel and grab the transitions on the read data line from the drive an analuse them in software later. -tony

Are you seriously suggesting that the rest of us can't join in to other discussions? Actually, 'PC' doesn't mean it will work with a KVM switch. I have 2 PCs on my desk, AFAIK I couldn't use a VM switch, at least not a normal, commercial one, to eliminate one of the keyboards and monitors. For reference the 2 machines are the much-hacked PC/AT with MDA display I am typing this on, and a PC/XT with CGA display. Both have the original IBM keyboards. Sure, and in a lot of cases that's a perfectly reasonable solution. It doesn't work foe all of us. Well, only if you don't want some of us pointing out it doesn't work in _all_ cases. -tony

On Saturday 14 January 2006 02:12 pm, Dave Dunfield wrote: May I suggest a simple filter, starting with _one_ name in it that seems to be a particular source of irritation? -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 00:58:58 +0000 (GMT) ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: Why are you participating in this thread, then? We are talking about preserving the data on old diskettes using a modern PC as the tool to do so with. Why should it matter to anybody interested in the topic that you don't have modern PCs to use as a tool for reading and preserving images? Your comments in this thread have been mostly offtopic. I'm a little disappointed that the 'Thanks again, Dave!' thread has turned into another rant.

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 09:54 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote: I could be mistaken, I haven't looked at a bunch of that stuff for a long time. I do know that some of those "PC" cards had that problem, but could be wrong about which ones... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

Roy J. Tellason wrote: Dave, what's the URL of that again? I love your info but hate your website organization :-) I need to build a cable to use with my d37 floppy controller and Imagedisk. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Dave, is the clock set right on your computer? At first I thought your messages were suffering terrible lag, but then you replied to some other post and your timestamp was hours before the one you were replying to. For instance, your most recent one is stamped as 9:31AM (not sure who's time zone). Perhaps your time is right but your timezone is funny.

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 05:59 pm, Scott Stevens wrote: I would tend to agree with this. Maybe relevant in terms of what you have to do while programming, though. Just a guess, as I haven't ventured there yet. Yup. Only problem is, I really don't have enough room here to stick another machine dedicated to reading CP/M disks, so I guess one of my other boxes is going to have to do... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

That was exactly my point - the analysis can be done in the driver (and hence the interrupt handler) without much trouble, however on a multitasking system, you cannot guarantee the real time requirement at the application level. Using the interrupt from one event to start the next event aliminates the task priority system entirely, and the only variability you may encounter is the interrupt latency, which would usually be acceptably low (unless you have other processor intensive interrupts, or mis-behaving applications which disable interrupts for extended periods of time, it should easily be within a sector time. -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Nico de Jong wrote: That is a SOFTWARE, not hardware, problem, likely due to software that relies on the OS to tell it what it can and can't do. There's nothing in the Compaticard that would need reverse engineering. Allison could probably design the same thing; CORRECTION: BETTER; in less time than it takes me to type this. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Tuesday 10 January 2006 02:33, dave04a at dunfield.com wrote: Suggestion to all the folks discussing "Windows" and "Floppy Controllers". Don't bother. Pick up an older PC with a FDC that works with ImageDisk, Teledisk, PUTR, etc. - and create a DOS partition and Linux partiton on it's HDD. You'll have the best of both worlds. Include an older SCSI controller (Adaptec or Buslogic will do) - this lets one read or write 9-track 800/1600/6250 tapes, TK50Z, 8mm Exabyte, Zip Disk, etc. as well. DOS --- ImageDisk, Teledisk for floppy image capture/restoration, PUTR to handle XXDP/RT/etc. capture/restore ST to create/restore using *.tap files FLX to create/restore RSTS media 22DISK to deal with CP/M-to-DOS Diskette "Interchange" etc. Linux ----- "dd", etc. to copy media Windows doesn't play well with ANY of the software mentioned above... Cheers, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. Mountain View, CA http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

On Tuesday 10 January 2006 04:38 pm, Lyle Bickley wrote: I would simplify that: "Window" -- Don't bother :-) I just recently discovered that in addition to mtools, linux also offers "cpmtools" which work similarly, I'm told. I got the package, but haven't installed it yet as I haven't decided which of the linux boxes here will be the one getting a 5.25" drive stuck in it. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin