New Falcon owner questions

[+Zeptari]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/302889548136

My Atari Falcon has a internal IDE to Compact Flash adapter in it.

If I install this floppy emulator will it work with that installed?

Can i transfer items on the Gotek to the internal compact flash drive?

thanks

[MrMaddog]

Yes, the Gotek is the floppy drive and the CF Card is the IDE hard drive. You should be able to drag files between them on the desktop...

[Guest]

Yes I was thinking that also.

I think it's as simple as making a blank floppy image in Steam on the PC. Dropping my files in it.

Then copying that file to a usb stick. Then sticking it in the Gotek on my Falcon.

Boot the Falcon with the image with my files selected and then I hope both the CF card and

the floppy shows on the desktop. Then copy files to the CF card.. Bingo!

 

I need to stop overthinking it , and just buy one! LOL

[ParanoidLittleMan]

There is simpler, faster and cheaper way: You can write files to CF card right with PC, via USB card. Condition for that is TOS/DOS partitioning.

And price is less than for Gotek: http://atari.8bitchip.info/pphdr.php

[leech]

Yeah, basically make sure your filesystem isn't byteswapped. PLM's driver is awesome also.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Yeah, basically make sure your filesystem isn't byteswapped. PLM's driver is awesome also.

It's not only byte-swap, what exists btw. only in case of IDE adapters, and there is no byte-swap with ACSI, SCSI, Satans. TOS/AHDI hard disk partitions are little different, + MBR (master boot record) is different, so DOS, Windows can not handle it. Some Linux distros were able, and there was option to compile Atari support in Kernel, but I think that it is rare case now.

[leech]

Yeah, in this particular case he's talking about his IDE drive, which some partitioning software likes to do the byte swap (for example my current SSD IDE drive is formatted that way, so I can't just plug it into my Falcon to get it to read).

 

If I recall, standard TOS is like FAT12? Which I believe Linux for the most part can read just fine. The fun one that is barely built anymore into the kernel is the Amiga FFS, though I think the source is still in there to enable it.

There is a program called 'disktype' that'll identify a ton of different disk formats. Granted that doesn't mean it'll mount them, but it is useful to identify things.

$ disktype Falcon.raw                      

--- Falcon.raw
Regular file, size 118.2 GiB (126963679232 bytes)
ATARI ST partition map
Partition 1: 972.7 MiB (1019902464 bytes, 1991997 sectors from 2, bootable)
  Type "BGM" (Big GEMDOS)
Partition 2: 972.7 MiB (1019934720 bytes, 1992060 sectors from 1991999)
  Type "BGM" (Big GEMDOS)
Partition 3: 9.537 GiB (10240473600 bytes, 20000925 sectors from 3984059)
  Type "LNX" (Unknown)
  Ext4 file system
    UUID 7B59529F-0847-417E-945E-4484591EF2BA (DCE, v4)
    Volume size 9.537 GiB (10240466944 bytes, 2500114 blocks of 4 KiB)
Partition 4: 106.8 GiB (114676853760 bytes, 223978230 sectors from 23984984)
  Type "LNX" (Unknown)
  FAT32 file system (hints score 4 of 5)
    Volume size 106.7 GiB (114564956160 bytes, 13984980 clusters of 8 KiB)
  Ext2 file system
    UUID 59397FF1-A1AC-4786-956C-EBD22E2C7B16 (DCE, v4)
    Volume size 106.8 GiB (114676850688 bytes, 27997278 blocks of 4 KiB)

Edited May 3, 2019 by leech

[ParanoidLittleMan]

FAT12 is for floppies. For hard disks it is FAT16 . And Atari TOS FAT16 is same as DOS FAT16 - until 32 MB partition size (except mentioned MBR) . It even keeps Intel type byte-swap, same as it is case with floppies. But over 32 MB TOS FAT16 is different, and I must say in not good way.

FAT16 means 16-bit file allocation table records, so there can be up to 65536 of them. 16-bit disk addressing means 65536 sectors - and that's mentioned 32 MB. And this is where TOS made some not good solutions, and the reason for it was, I'm sure, not really good C compiler for 68000 at Digital Research. They kept 16-bit sector addressing for larger partitions (on 32-bit CPU !) and that's why large logical sectors were used. For instance on max size, 512 MB partitions logical sector size is 8 KB (16 normal sectors). And that's minimal size what hard disk driver can read or write for TOS . And that's not efficient. Then, FAT is actually FAT15 - since max count of clusters is 32768 and not 65536 . And while 512 MB partition size was OK for those years (1989), large logical sectors were not good solution.

 

What you posted stays only for Falcon - only it can 1GB partitions, but it is same system, called BGM (big GEM partitions), where logical sectors are even larger - 16 KB .

[JamesWD]

Just upgraded my IDE drive to CF card (sandisk) recently on my falcon, had some issues with HDDRIVER both original version I had on my HD (4.xx) and the latest (10.xx) using the CF card.

 

Changed to ICD Drivers works like a charm now.

[Guest]

Wow! That's alot to digest. Thanks for the link ParanoidLittleMan.