reading os-9 disk in windows
Hoffman G.
manufacturing machines. i see plenty of os-9 branding when the machine
is powering on so im assuming this is some sort of os-9 based machine.
problem is, i need to clone this disk to essentially make a backup
drive. if i insert this pcmcia disk into my windows based computer the
drive itself is recognized, but win cant mount it as it doesnt
recognize the filesystem.
what options do i have to read the contents of this drive, or clone
this drive?
Martin Gregorie
The OS-9 filing system is not, AFAIK, readable by any version of Windows
or any Windows application. However, there are a few ways of getting
round that:
- if you have a program that can copy a complete disk image at the
block level without understanding the disk structure, use that.
If you had Linux you could use "dd" but I don't know what the Windows
equivalent is, or even if there is one.
- run the OS-9 emulator, os9exec, under Windows and use it to copy
the contents of the pcmcia disk to a disk image on the Windows machine.
That can then be backed up normally. os9exec is an Open Source project:
http://www.synthesis.ch/os9exec/
Once you have the disk image you can also manipulate it with os9exec
because most OS-9 utilities will run under it. NOTE - this assumes
your OS-9 systems are running the 68000 port of OS-9, rather than one
of the x368 ports.
- if you have network or serial connections to the OS-9 machines you
can use Kermit to copy the production disks to another machine
that's also running Kermit.
- if you have the free disk space on OS-9, you can make a compressed
archive of the OS-9 disk(s) and copy that with Kermit. This might
be quicker. There are versions of the common archivers (tar, zip,
gzip and lha) for both OS-9 and Windows.
- network-connected copies of OS-9 can also use FTP for file transfers.
- OS-9 can also write to DOS-formatted FAT disks though its slow and does
require a floppy drive or a hard drive that's been formatted as a
FAT-16 drive via its PCFS drivers and I/O manager.
If you can tell us more about your setup we can probably come up with
more specific suggestions, but we need to know what version of OS-9
you're using, what sort of hardware its on and what is available in terms
of disk drives, networking or serial ports that are accessible to OS-9.
--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |