Re: Reading Apple2 floppies on a PC using Disk2FDI
Tim Haynes
Cheers
Tim
"Oliver Schmidt" <ol...@web.de> wrote in message
news:cf56ib$b0j$1...@online.de...
> Hi,
>
> now and then somebody asks here about reading Apple floppies on a PC
> for converting them to disk images usable with Apple2 emulators.
>
> Considered impossible for more than a decade this is in fact possible
> with Disk2FDI available at http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi. Because
> of the several scenarios and usecases described I found the Disk2FDI
> docs a little confusing. Therefore I'd like to share my personal
> experience with Disk2FDI:
>
> My original setup was quite common. A single 3,5" floppy drive and a
> "modern" Windows on the hard disk completely formatted with NTFS. BTW:
> The following should be identical for Linux users.
>
> 1. I got myself an old 5,25" 1,2 MB floppy drive from TEAC. The
> Disk2FDI docs say that for our usecase any 5,25" drive will work.
>
> 2. I noticed that my floppy drive cable had only connectors for 3,5"
> drives so I had to get one with at least one connector for a 5,25"
> drive.
>
> 3. I installed the 5,25" drive and connected it as drive B: (in other
> words "in the middle" of the cable) leaving the existing 3,5"
> connected as drive A: (at the end of the cable).
>
> 4. I added the 5,25" 1.2MB drive as second floppy drive into the BIOS
> and made sure that booting from a floppy disk is generally enabled.
>
> 5. I created a MS-DOS bootdisk. The Disk2FDI docs say that images for
> DOS bootdisks that are available at http://www.bootdisk.com/ in case
> you shouldn't have MS-DOS at hand anymore.
>
> 6. I added the disk2fdi.com program to the bootdisk and rebooted my PC
> from that bootdisk.
>
> 7. I write-protected the Apple2 floppy disk to read and inserted it
> into the 5,25" drive.
>
> 8. I entered
>
> disk2fdi /SDO16 b: mydisk.do
>
> which successfully wrote a mydisk.do image to the 3,5" bootdisk. BTW:
> This can be done for several images as a 1,44MB floppy disk has space
> for many 140kB images.
>
> 9. I removed the 3,5" bootdisk and rebooted my PC from the hard disk
> again.
>
> 10. I re-inserted the 3,5" bootdisk and finally copied the image(s) to
> the hard disk.
>
> Finally I'd like to thank Vincent Joguin for this great piece of
> software !
>
> Oliver
>
Michael J. Mahon
>"Oliver Schmidt" <ol...@web.de> wrote in message
>news:cf56ib$b0j$1...@online.de...
>> Hi,
>>
>> now and then somebody asks here about reading Apple floppies on a PC
>> for converting them to disk images usable with Apple2 emulators.
>>
>> Considered impossible for more than a decade this is in fact possible
>> with Disk2FDI available at http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi. Because
>> of the several scenarios and usecases described I found the Disk2FDI
>> docs a little confusing. Therefore I'd like to share my personal
>> experience with Disk2FDI:
<snip detailed instructions>
>> 8. I entered
>>
>> disk2fdi /SDO16 b: mydisk.do
>>
>> which successfully wrote a mydisk.do image to the 3,5" bootdisk. BTW:
>> This can be done for several images as a 1,44MB floppy disk has space
>> for many 140kB images.
>>
>> 9. I removed the 3,5" bootdisk and rebooted my PC from the hard disk
>> again.
>>
>> 10. I re-inserted the 3,5" bootdisk and finally copied the image(s) to
>> the hard disk.
>>
>> Finally I'd like to thank Vincent Joguin for this great piece of
>> software !
>
>Great work, Oliver! Anybody care to duplicate his success??
Oliver inspired me to set up an older PC with 3.5" and 5.25"
drives and give it a try.
I had some confusion and very limited success.
First, what is the option flag "O" that Oliver used? I can't find it
in the DISK2FDI documentation.
When I used "/S16 /D" for the option string, things started to work,
but the program hung asking for a formatted disk in A:, which
contained the boot disk!
If I manually ejected the boot disk, getting an "Abort, Retry, Fail"
message, and then re-inserted the disk into the (still running) drive,
then answered R)etry, it would happily process track 0, reporting
it as a standard DOS 3.3+ track.
The program then hung again. Repeating the above process let
it read track 1, too, then subsequent tracks came up "16 bad sectors".
Since this is a freshly written ProDOS diskette, and all sectors
verify on an Apple II, I'm at a loss to understand what is going on.
-michael
Check out parallel computing for 8-bit Apples on my
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
Oliver Schmidt
>>> disk2fdi /SDO16 b: mydisk.do
>First, what is the option flag "O" that Oliver used? I can't find it
>in the DISK2FDI documentation.
From the Disk2FDI usage screens (obtained with disk2fdi /?):
S[fff][nn][.e] : creates a Sector-dumped image file.
[...]
- fff is an optional format specification. The following are valid:
[...]
DO=Apple disk ][
[...]
The DO parameter must be specified with the "nn" parameter in the form
DO13 or DO16.
So after all "/SDO16" is the "/S" option with [fff] being "DO" and
[nn] being "16".
Oliver
Ed Eastman
a boot disk only I have a FAT32 partition on my hard drive that i can
save disk images to.
I was very please with the success I had except for the back side of the
disk issue. I am working on a mod to bypass the index hole by using a
track zero sensor off of an old 800k drive. I'll post the whole thing
to the AppleLinc.org web site when I get it done.
Thankx,
Ed
8-Bit
Thanks, Corey
On Mon, 09 Aug 2004 15:10:22 +0200, Oliver Schmidt <ol...@web.de>
wrote:
Michael J. Mahon
>Can a disk image (*.dsk) be written back with Disk2FDI?
According to the documentation, this cannot be done because
the PC floppy controller interprets all "write" operations as
MFM, and the transitions written to disk therefore cannot be
sufficiently controlled.
Michael J. Mahon
Well, that's what I get for using an older version (0.97a). I now
have the latest (0.99a) and it includes the options you describe.
Unfortunately, it is still prone to the same non-functional
behavior.
Upon <Enter> after the command, the program loads, then
displays the "how to get help" line and then hangs, spinning
the 3.5" disk (drive a:).
My "trick" of manually ejecting the 3.5" disk, then responding
"R)etry" to the error message after re-inserting gets it going
again, but, again, only the first two tracks of my ProDOS disk
are read correctly. All others have "16 bad sectors". ;-(
So far, I'd have to say this isn't working for me...
I should mention that both disk drives work fine in their usual
behavior with MFM disks.
Charlie
"Tim Haynes" <timh...@no.spam.please.alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote in
message news:4116ea23$1...@news.cybersurf.net...
> Great work, Oliver! Anybody care to duplicate his success??
>
> Cheers
> Tim
Yes, I have been using Disk2FDI since last year. It's a great program. I
have archived several hundred 5.25" floppies. It works as Oliver stated
but it can also be used from Windows 95, 98 or ME as well as long as you
are using the "two drive" mode.
I use the form:
disk2fdi /S b: mydisk.do
This way it automatically detects what type of disk you have including 13
sector (DOS 3.2.x) disks although I haven't found any emulator that
supports 13 sector disk images.
I now use the registered version, a fast parallel port and a simple 2 wire
cable and it is much faster and you can read 3.5" floppies as well.
Disk2FDI also can produce FDI images which have the potential to allow many
copy-protected disks to be archived. Unfortunately, there are no Apple II
emulators or utilities that support the FDI format.
Charlie
Rob
<char...@NOSPAMbboard.com> wrote:
>Disk2FDI also can produce FDI images which have the potential to allow many
>copy-protected disks to be archived. Unfortunately, there are no Apple II
>emulators or utilities that support the FDI format.
>
Interesting. I'll have to buy a 5.25" IBM floppy and try this.
So my question is, what is the FDI format for if you can't use it in
an emulator?
We need something to convert .FDI to .NIB. :)
Robert
Charlie
"Rob" <bobh...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:f7efh09nhpu287e09...@4ax.com...
> On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 13:13:31 -0400, "Charlie"
> <char...@NOSPAMbboard.com> wrote:
>
>
> >Disk2FDI also can produce FDI images which have the potential to allow
many
> >copy-protected disks to be archived. Unfortunately, there are no Apple
II
> >emulators or utilities that support the FDI format.
> >
>
> Interesting. I'll have to buy a 5.25" IBM floppy and try this.
>
> So my question is, what is the FDI format for if you can't use it in
> an emulator?
At this time there isn't much use for it in the Apple II world, but
Disk2FDI and the FDI format can be used with floppies other than Apple II.
Currently, as far as I know there is only one emulator (Amiga, I think)
that supports it.
I hope that someone who maintains an Apple II emulator will decide to
support it.
>
> We need something to convert .FDI to .NIB. :)
That would be a start, but the FDI format copies a lot more data off the
original disk than just the encoded nibbles making it possible to make
"exact" copies in many cases.
By the way FDI images are very large (over 2MB for a 140K Apple II floppy)
and they can take a long time to create so they would probably only be
useful for copy-protected disks that can't be copied any other way.
Charlie
Oliver Schmidt
>It works as Oliver stated
>but it can also be used from Windows 95, 98 or ME as well as long as you
>are using the "two drive" mode.
Of course you are right but I didn't mention Win9x because:
1. It is much easier to use there so a step by step tutorial isn't
necessary.
2. I explicitly wanted to cut down all the possible scenarios to the
most popular one - and that should be WinXP in the meanwhile.
>disk2fdi /S b: mydisk.do
>
>This way it automatically detects what type of disk you have including 13
>sector (DOS 3.2.x) disks although I haven't found any emulator that
>supports 13 sector disk images.
I intentionally used a very verbose command line as the handling of
defaults in Disk2FDI has changed in the past and is likely to change
again when FDI support comes back. And I wanted to increase the
possibility that the command line is still correct when somebody
googles it in the future.
Oliver
Oliver Schmidt
>I hope that someone who maintains an Apple II emulator will decide to
>support it.
much too soon to promise something but I'm contact with Vincent (the
author of Disk2FDI) so probably something will happen sometime ;-)
Oliver
Charlie
"Michael J. Mahon" <mjm...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040809131812...@mb-m02.aol.com...
> Oliver Schmidt replied:
>
> >>>> disk2fdi /SDO16 b: mydisk.do
> >
> >>First, what is the option flag "O" that Oliver used? I can't find it
> >>in the DISK2FDI documentation.
> >
> >From the Disk2FDI usage screens (obtained with disk2fdi /?):
> >
> >S[fff][nn][.e] : creates a Sector-dumped image file.
> >[...]
> >- fff is an optional format specification. The following are valid:
> >[...]
> >DO=Apple disk ][
> >[...]
> >The DO parameter must be specified with the "nn" parameter in the form
> >DO13 or DO16.
> >
> >So after all "/SDO16" is the "/S" option with [fff] being "DO" and
> >[nn] being "16".
>
> Well, that's what I get for using an older version (0.97a). I now
> have the latest (0.99a) and it includes the options you describe.
>
> Unfortunately, it is still prone to the same non-functional
> behavior.
Michael,
I'm not sure if this is your problem but there are some 3.5" drives that
don't work well with Disk2FDI.
List of Disk2FDI-compatible hardware
------------------------------------
Known 3.5" floppy disk drives with a real index signal (good):
- Hewlett Packard
- D2035-60121
- Mitsumi
- MF355F-3250MG
- Samsung
- SFD-321B
- Sony
- MPF920-E
- Panasonic (Matsushita)
- JU-257A606P
Known 3.5" floppy disk drives with a fake index signal (bad):
- Alps Electric co., ltd.
- Mitsumi
- D359M3
- D359M3D
- D359T6
- Nec
- FD1231H
-----------------------------------
I've been using the Nec - FD1231H (fake index signal) and using a cable to
get the index signal from a high-speed parallel port and it works
flawlessly but when I try to use it without the cable (two drive mode) I
get results similar to what you describe.
When using the Sony drive (real index signal) I have no trouble with
Disk2FDI reading 5.25" Apple II disks in the "two drive mode".
Charlie
PowerPointSamuri
(][gs) 3.5" disks?