imagedisk to create files on Hard Disk
Keith
I'm looking to see if I can expand the image file to a hard drive and not a A;
or B:. I know if I try to create a image disk on using the HD I will more then
likely trash the drive but wonder is I can expand the image to see what is
contained in the image and extract files? Thanks
Dave Dunfield
Assuming you are talking about my ImageDisk program (IMD.COM)..
ImageDisk does not know about the native filesystem of the target,
it only knows about physical disk formatting - it can analyze a disk
and record information about it's physical formatting, along with the
data from the sectors, and it can recreate that disk with exactly the
same formatting, but it knows nothing about files, directories or the
logical organization of the volume represented within the image.
The reason you can list directories and access files after recreating
the disk to an actual floppy is because that floppy is an exact copy
of the original, and the operating system of the target computer knows
how to understand it as a logical volume - this has nothing to do with
the fact that the copy was created with ImageDisk....
You can however convert the ImageDisk .IMD image file into a file
containing a raw binary dump of the disk - the IMDU (ImageDisk Utiilty)
program can do this for you. This will essentially strip away all the
headers which describes the sectors, heads, cylinders, data rate,
sector size and all other metadata that ImageDisk has stored in the
.IMD file, leaving only the raw sector data organized logically by
physical cylinders, heads and sectors in ascending order (notethat
the physical sector order does not always match the logical sector
order - IMDU can re-organize the sectors when converting to binary
if necessary, but you need to know the details of the disk formats in
order tto tell it how to do this)....
Once you have a raw binary dump of the disk, then you can use a
hex editor to poke around the data the same way you would look
around a hard drive with a debugger - or if a simulator exists for the
target, it might be able to understand the raw disk dump and mount
is as a logical volume allowing you to run the target OS on the
simulator and access individual files - there may also be third party
utilities which can understand a raw image file and import/export
files (like my NSI utiilty for NorthStar images). - but none of these
are the domain of ImageDisk, which deals only which the physical
format of the media.
Regards,
Dave
--
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Software/firmware development services Fax:613-256-5821
Keith
the Horizon emulator. After a few minutes I was able to get it working with all
the NS images. It is a nice emulator with allot of detail including CTRL-C when
you load a new image in a drive you had already used.
Very nice and well done. I haven't tried getting it to work with my NS horizon
yet.
Dave Dunfield
>the Horizon emulator. After a few minutes I was able to get it working with all
>the NS images. It is a nice emulator with allot of detail including CTRL-C when
>you load a new image in a drive you had already used.
Thanks - just so you understand - CTRL-C is not a function of the simulator,
it's a standard function of CP/M. The simulator recreates all of the Horizon
hardware including the CPU, memory, floppy disk controller, serial ports
etc. It does not "fake" any of the software (even the disk boot code in the
virtual MDC/MDS is an image of the actual N* ROM). When you see the
boot messages and command prompt, you are not seeing a program that
is designed to look like the N* operating system (there are some simulators
that work that way), you are seeing the actual OS software booting on the
simulated hardware. When you use CTRL-C, CP/M running on the simulator
handles it exactly the same way it does on the real hardare (it's the same
code).
>Very nice and well done. I haven't tried getting it to work with my NS horizon
>yet.
You can set a virtual serial port on the simulator horizon to map to a real
serial port on your PC, and then you can connect and transfer data beween
the simulator and a real horizon exactly as you might have two real units.
You can also use my NST system (included with the simulator) to transfer
diskette images to and from physical disks via a serial connection to your
horizon.
[You can even use NST running on one PC to transger disk images to and
from images under the simulator running the client on another PC - don't
laugh, I actually do this sometimes when I am testing NST].
Dave Dunfield
This may help a little...
I've just posted an update to ImageDisk which contain a new utility
called "ImageDisk Viewer" - this is a fairly simple HEX dump/edit
utility that lets you view the content of individual sectors in
HEX/ASCII/EBCDIC/Custom-character-set as well as search for
strings, and a function to extract and display all printable strings
from the image starting at any point.
Since it's an ImageDisk utility, it knows about the image file format,
and will present the data in proper interleaved sector order, and
knows how to scan/search transparently across sector and track
boundaries.
It doesn't know about files, and cannot extract them, however I find
it very useful to look inside an image and help determine what is
contained within.
Regards,
Dave
--
dave06a@ Low-cost firmware development tools: www.dunfield.com
dunfield. Collector of classic pre-PC computer systems.
com http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html