Copy Disk Images to SD card

[John Fuller]

I believe I have corrupted the 128MB SD card with the DISKxx.DSK files.  I have a replacement SD card (8GB, not 128MB, can I use it?), how do I copy the .DSK images to a new card from Win10? Is the new card formatted with Fat32?

[Frank P.]

Yes, FAT32 is fine and 8GB is fine (though you'll never fill it). Preferably use the SD Association's SD Card Formatter. Then just copy the files to the SD card on your Windows machine. If you hadn't saved a copy of the files, you can get them from the disks directory of this archive: https://github.com/dhansel/Altair8800. If you've added additional customized disks, you'll have to find backup copies of them and manually copy them to the SD card, as well as edit the DISKDIR.TXT, HDSKDIR.TXT, TDISKDIR.TXT, and/or CDISKDIR.TXT as appropriate to whatever disks you've added.

If you've modified any of the disks on the corrupted card and don't have a backup, then you'll have lost those modifications.

[Chris Davis]

You can download the .DSK archive here: https://www.adwaterandstir.com/instructions/

[Chris Davis]

That archive includes the STORAGE.DAT file with the configurations to use the VT100 emulator and DB9 port.  If you download the archive from David's github you will need to set those up manually.

[John Fuller]

Frank - many thanks, worked perfectly.  I had tried to format the SD using the PC Win10 tools, copied files, did not work.  Thank you for showing me SD Formatter, I was unaware of it.  (I have done a lot of work with RPi's and BBB's, and using Win10 to format and the SD's worked fine.)  Still a newbie in this 8-bit world ....

Big help.

tks&rgds/jack

[Frank P.]

I really don't know what SD Formatter does differently from Windows, but I always see that it is the recommended way to format an SD card (with no explanation), so that's what I do.