E01 (Was: Raspberry Pi floppy interface.

[Fred Cisin]

>> eg: What is the structure of the "Header Case Information" block?
>> The E01 would be adequate (barely), if accompanied by an additional
>> "metadata" file that describes the physical format.  (In much more
>> detail than just "IBM PC 360K", etc.)  For MOST situations, OS,
>> encoding, bytes per sector, sectors per track, interleave, side pattern,
>> size of index and inter-sector gaps, etc. might do.  That would still be
>> far from PERFECT, because it would fail to catch . . .

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> Somewhere on the LOC website, there is a bit more detail--and source for
> Linux tools under "ewf-tools" is also available.
>
> The header information for E01 files is fairly rigid in structure.  But
> a text description of, say, a Victor 9000 floppy is kind of hard to put
> into 50 words or less.

not even 64 bit ones.
With a lot more space, you could write a reasonably usable description. 
But it would have to be an extensible variable length field to permit 
identifying various exceptions and oddities.  Therefore, the media 
physical format description would have to be a separate file from the E01 
"data from the disk".


> So, when an archivist talks about forensic data image, I scratch my head
> in bewilderment.  I try to put things in terms that they might
> understand; to wit, "If you had temporary custody of an extremely rare
> book, would you be content with just the text of the book, or would you
> want photographic images of every page?"

An excellent analogy.  I guess that they would not be interested in a 
separate file of a photographic image of every page to accompany the file 
of the text of the book.

> But I'm sure that Fred is well acquainted with the "This is what they
> told us was the Right Thing to Do, so that's what we want."  phenomenon.

BTDT.
In addition to Xenosoft (concurrently!), I was a community college 
professor, dealing with college administrators for 35 years.  Sometimes 
you can not get past the Misplaced Authority Syndrome to explain reality.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com