Sector copy program for 1.44MB disks?

[OmaOhneBH]

Up to 65535 sectors is what I'm looking for.

[+Nezgar]

Up to 65535 sectors is what I'm looking for.

Try MyDOS sector copy "J. Duplicate Disk"

1,2(1-65535)

 

Or to not format the destination drive 2:

1,2/N(1-65535)

 

According to the MyDOS user manual, if sector range is not specified, only sectors marked in use in the DOS bitmap (in the VTOC sectors) will be copied. That would make it much faster...

[_The Doctor__]

is that a sector copy?

[+CharlieChaplin]

Hmmm,

 

for up to 65,535 sectors I have the following copy programs:

(SDFS means Sparta DOS File System, e.g. SpartaDOS, SDX, RealDOS, BeweDOS)

 

- HDSC by KMK/Drac030, already mentioned here, SDFS only

(and the version I have is very old, so most-likely outdated and/or buggy and replaced with one or more newer versions)

 

- Secopy by Erhard Puetz, SDFS only (two or more versions available, I only have the old + buggy version on this ATR, a newer+bugfree version is on one of the 136 Abbuc magazines and I am too lazy to search for it)

 

- Full Scale Sector Copy by Carsten Strotmann, seems to execute under DOS 2.x, but I have no docs / instruct. / manual available for it, not even a simple informative text, just the program and the Forth (!) source which is greek to me and I am unable to operate the program (do not know what to input at the prompt, whatever I type I get a response like "DIR WHAT?" or "HELP WHAT?" or "... WHAT?"); most-likely an older (outdated) version...

 

I never used any of these three programs (and never looked for any updates of them) ! Most of the time I use sectorcopy programs for 90k/130k/180k and sometimes also 360k and 720k, but thats it. For larger disks or ATR images, I use filecopy programs, since the large disks / ATR images almost always do contain files (and I have never seen a "bootdisk" with e.g. 16MB in size without VTOC, without DIR, without DOS filesystem, etc.)...

 

@Pirx: Can you create an executable of your program ? I do not know how to do that, since I have never used an assembler...

HDDCOPY.zip

Edited April 23, 2019 by CharlieChaplin

[+CharlieChaplin]

Curious as I am, I just created an ATR image (MyDOS) and tested a diskcopy program, if it will eventually work with 16MB. The program is meant to copy disks with 40 tracks, 77 tracks and 80 tracks, single and double density. Will not work with 16MB, I said to myself, but nevertheless tested it.

 

The program is named "Disk Duplication" and can 1) copy a whole disk, 2) copy sectors and 3) setup a ramdisk as XRAM. So I created an ATR image (90k) with SIO2PC, put MyDOS on it, put a ramdisk-driver (MyRamd2) as first Autorun (*.AR0, not really required), an ultraspeed driver as second Autorun (*.AR1, not really required) and the disk duplication program as third Autorun (*.AR2) on the disk image. Booted the image and it worked as it should, ramdisk was setup (with my settings = 512k), ultraspeed-driver booted and copy program loaded. So far, so good...

 

Next I installed a 16MB ATR image (BOSS-X) as D1: and then did choose my wanted settings in the copy program. I did choose: 3) setup ramdisk (therefore ultraspeed was gone!) and then 2) copy sectors. Then I input start sector = 1 and end sector = 65500, next came the (redundant) disk settings, here I did choose 80 trks/DS and double density, then source = drive 1 and destination = drive 2 and finally format disk = no and display sectors = yes. The program prompted me to press return and after I did this, it started reading... but after some minutes I stopped it (Break key!), because reading 16MB with 1x SIO speed takes a bit long

 

So I did the next test, this time I did input start sector = 64999 and end sector = 65500 and all other settings as before. To my surprise, the program started reading sectors 64999 and all that followed up to 65500, then the program prompted me to insert the destination disk. Well, I did not do that, since I did not have an empty 16MB ATR available under SIO2PC (which runs under MS-DOS on my PC). But reading seems to have been successfull ! You should test yourself if writing also works without problems and tell me the result... think it will work (or fail) much faster with your harddisk, than with my SIO2PC emulation... But do a test with non-important data first, so in case something goes wrong, you do not lose valuable / important data (better safe than sorry)...

 

And, if you are using a harddisk, there is no need to use or setup a ramdisk, so you can e.g. rename (renumber) MyRamd.AR0 to *.COM and then *.AR1 to *.AR0 and *.AR2 to *.AR1 if you want...

 

Theoretically, it should also be possible to copy 1.44MB disks with it, by setting start sector =1 and end sector = 5760 (and 80 Trks/DS, DD/256Bytes), but you have to test this yourself, since I do not use 1.44MB floppies with my A8 (the maximum I use is 720k floppies with my Hyper-XF)...

16MB_COPY_Test.zip

Edited April 23, 2019 by CharlieChaplin

[1050]

is that a sector copy?

It is if you force it to be one with the full range

of sectors available on the disks. Without the forced

sector specification, MyDOS would rely on the VTOC

sectors marked as used and only copy those. And that

would be a file copy instead.

 

But problems will abound with MyDOS since it doesn't

properly record the drive configuration if it's just

a bit out of the ordinary drive and disk being used.

Troubles begin with double sided disks and for those

or above in capacity one will have to configure both

drives before attempting any format or it will fail

miserably to produce a good output.

 

So after doing the above for both drives,

1,2(1-5760)

would be proper for 1.44 disk since 1-2880 describes

720k sector copy properly.

 

2,880 x 256 = 737,280 = 720k where

1,024 bytes = 1k

We've doubled sectors per track from 9 MS-DOS to 18

since MS-DOS sectors are 512 bytes and our best is

usually 256 bytes.

 

1.44 requires then doubling again of sectors per track

to 36.

 

BTW - you have officially entered the MyDOS bug Zone.

YMMV is putting it lightly.

I've never attempted such a thing and can only wish

for a good journey to all those that proceed from here.

 

Does anybody have any guesses as to what a 66h SIO

command for 1.44 would look like? Format Disk with

Special Sector Skew to refresh memories. With 36

available does hardware accept any order desired

and/or is it more a standard I've never encountered

anyway? I'd like to know because I was charged with

writing a stand alone format program for MyDOS and I

simply have not seen a single thing about this platform

and it's status call (53h) return info nor it's read

percom block (4Eh) results either. So the entire reason

that MyDOS has this formatting problem in the first place

is because Marslett dictated to the drive what their

various response should be instead of accounting for

individual drive makers to abscond with the percom

standards and use what they wanted too in non critical

areas of the block. And this is not allowed by the logic

in Marslett's rigid world. The drive then doesn't accept

the Marslett corrected to proper and published percom block

ONLY data sent back to it and Marslett code isn't in the

mood (or capable) to accept a drive NAK at this point.

Puff's fix was to ignore what the drive said and send

it what is in memory for it. You want a special configuration,

you have to put it in memory first with O) Configure

drive option.

 

End of the day we can all sit back and pontificate on

what a proper return would look like, but it's not going

to work if one byte is wrong. I'd rather look at real drive

return information on as many 1.44 drives as I can gather

since I have currently zip for any of it. Please post or PM

me with anything you got regarding 53h, 4Eh SIO responses

and what do we do with 66h and sector ordering issue? TIA.

[OmaOhneBH]

Curious as I am, I just created an ATR image (MyDOS) and tested a diskcopy program...

 

Thank you very much for your effort, CC! Will test Disk Duplicator soon. Thanks!

[OmaOhneBH]

The image I'm going to copy to hd is a 65535 sectors DD image, as shown by AspeQt:

 

 

 

 

So, according to that, I'm not sure which option to choose:

 

 

 

[+CharlieChaplin]

The image I'm going to copy to hd is a 65535 sectors DD image, as shown by AspeQt:

 

 

 

 

So, according to that, I'm not sure which option to choose:

 

 

 

 

 

In my tests with SIO2PC this did not matter! You may choose any of the six options (a harddisk does not have disksides, I did choose 80 tracks/DS and at least reading worked). More important is the density in the next options screen, choose either single density (128 Bytes per sector) or double density (256 Bytes per sector). Since your 16MB image is DD, choose double density. And when the program asks about formatting choose "No" (your destination harddisk partition must be already formatted then), so it will not try to format the hdd with 40 or 80 tracks, but just write the sectors in the chosen density...

 

But again, this is a disk copy program and errmm, I tested with SIO2PC which also emulates disk drives, so I am not absolutely sure if it will really work with harddisks...

Edited April 24, 2019 by CharlieChaplin

[+CharlieChaplin]

Alright,

 

I just made a video of the copying process of a 16MB ATR image with Disk Duplication 2.0 under Atari 800 Win. (Therefore I did create an empty 16MB MyDOS image with makeATR 0.6 as destination disk and used one of my 16MB demo images as source disk.) First thing you notice is, that the copy process is extremely slow - and I can tell you why: My OS is still Win XP 32 Bit and I am using an old dual-core PC with 2x 3.1Ghz. When I set the Atari emulation to full speed, it shows speed = 2048%. BUT: When I do a video recording in Atari 800 Win, then the emulation speed goes down to 120%-130%, no matter if Atari emulation is set to full speed or not... and that is why the copying process is so slow (its not much faster than a standard 1050 with 19k2 Baud).

 

Think you will not record your copy process, thus the speed should be somewhat faster. It would be quite fast with a real A8 harddisk - but you are using AspeQT (A8 floppy emulation, afaik), so I guess it will be faster than a 1050 but most likely not as fast as a real A8 harddisk. Copying a 16MB image with floppy drive speed (even when using ultraspeed or Pokey divisor zero) will alas take some hours.

TIP: Use two drives/images, but do not use/setup a ramdisk; the ultraspeed driver should work then and should make the copy process a little faster. If Aspeqt or your Atari allows to set the emulation speed to a faster rate (e.g. Pokey divisor zero), then do this, but de-activate the ultraspeed driver then (rename MyRamd.AR0 to *.COM, rename *.AR1 to *.COM and finally rename *.AR2 to *.AR0, so only the copy program will be loaded from MyDOS)...

 

Enough said, here is the recording, video 1 shows copying a 16MB ATR image with Disk Duplication 2.0 from drive1 to drive 2 (emulated under Atari 800 Win), starting with sector 1 and interrupted after a while; video 2 shows almost the same, but this time starting with sector 24000... the video uses the .AVI container with XVID compression, hope you can play it back and watch it...

 

16MB Copy Process with Disk Duplication 2.0:

16MB_Copy_V1.zip

16MB_Copy_V2.zip

Edited April 24, 2019 by CharlieChaplin

[OmaOhneBH]

I gave it a shot, it took 4 hours - quite a few sectors before end of copy procedure there was given two or three errors, #144 I think and two others (not sure which ones, didn't wrote them down, shame on me). Nevertheless, in MyDos all subdirectories and files will be shown - looks like a succesful copy process.

 

However, booting the copied image will show this

 

in stead of this

 

 

 

Before copying I set up the partiton to 65535 sectors DD and formatted it - after formatting process MyDos did not show 65535 sectors free, but a few less due to formatting (65491 IIRC) - maybe the errors were shown because of the missing a few sectors on destination partition? However, in MyDos, there will be still shown 1216 free sectors remaining on both the source drive and the destination partition.

 

I'm going to test it again, when having time for it.

cheers

.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Ah yes, MyDOS requires several more sectors (normally data sectors) for VTOC and Directory of such a big (hard)disk image. Still I think it should not matter if the copied sectors are data sectors, VTOC sectors or directory sectors, the copy program normally does not care whats in a sector. (If you format a disk in single density, you normally get 707 free sectors, if you then use a sectorcopy and copy a 90k disk with 720 sectors onto it, this works without problems, since the sectorcopy also copies the boot, VTOC and Dir sectors into the correct places; same with a 16MB MyDOS image, after formatting it has less than 65535 sectors due to boot, VTOC and Dir sectors, but when copying a full 16MB image onto it, this should work and all the boot, directory and VTOC sectors should be in the correct places.)

 

Maybe you can take another look at the disk directory with some tool and repair it ?!? There is VTOCfix by Bob Puff for MyDOS 4.5x to repair the VTOC, but atm I do not remember a program to repair directories + sub-directories on 16MB large MyDOS disks/images.

 

But most of all, I do not understand why MyDOS shows all the files, dirs, subdirs and free sectors, while MyPicoDOS shows garbage...?!? Not sure if this is caused by a bug of the Disk Duplication 2.0 program or by a bug of MyPicoDOS or something else ?!? Think I will do a full test at the next weekend and also try to copy a full 16MB image (not only a few hundred or one thousand sectors, but the full 65535 sectors) and then look at the result... if it is as faulty as yours, then its most likely a bug (or several bugs) of the Disk Duplication program...

[Mathy]

Hello Andreas

 

If you format a disk in single density, you normally get 707 free sectors ...

 

MyDOS gives you 708 free sectors.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[+Nezgar]

If you're doing a sector copy, you shoudnt need to format the destination disk. The ATR is already prepared with 65535 blank sectors. 'Formatting' might cause the SIO2PC to reconfigure the disk...

Try the /N parameter in the mydos copy

[OmaOhneBH]

 

But most of all, I do not understand why MyDOS shows all the files, dirs, subdirs and free sectors, while MyPicoDOS shows garbage...?!? Not sure if this is caused by a bug of the Disk Duplication 2.0 program or by a bug of MyPicoDOS or something else ?!? Think I will do a full test at the next weekend and also try to copy a full 16MB image (not only a few hundred or one thousand sectors, but the full 65535 sectors) and then look at the result... if it is as faulty as yours, then its most likely a bug (or several bugs) of the Disk Duplication program...

 

No need to test it, I just tried it a second time, sector 1 to 64319 in order to avoid the error messages near to the end of the copying procedure, there are 1216 sectors free anyway --> same result: directory seems to be garbage... until - out of the nowhere - option F catched my eye, hitting F four times changed the setting to DD/MyDOS, and that did the trick, now everthing will be shown correctly. Cheers!

 

[Mathy]

Hello Grandma without ...

 

You're using 4.05 of MyPicoDOS. 4.06 has been available for a while.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[+CharlieChaplin]

Aha, good that it works now - allthough it seems a bit strange to me that you have to press the "F" key several times...

 

Copied a 16MB MyDOS image (with hundreds of TIP animations and several subdirs) onto an empty 16MB image, using Disk Duplication 2.0 under SIO2PC with 2x or 3x SIO speed. The copy process did take approx. 6 hours. Near the end I got an Error message (the last 3000 sectors on the image were empty anyways, so it did not matter), but the copied image with the old MypicoDOS 4.05 on it did work without problems and did not show any garbage. There was also no need to press the "F" key several times. Do not know why the error happened (both 16MB images did have MyDOS format, DD and 65535 sectors) and why it happened at sector 65509, just 26 sectors before the end was reached ?!? I am also not sure if the Error happened while reading the source or writing to the destination...?!? Even more strange, when the Error happened, the program not only showed the error message, but also asked "Continue?", when I did press the "Y" key it started reading from sector 1 again, which I immediately aborted by pressing the Reset key...

 

Attached are two short videos (sorry for the bad quality, my digital camera is very old and does not have "shaking protection" and other nice things), video one shows the end of the copy process (empty sectors, so you only see the sector numbers changing on the badly flickering tv), while video two shows the booting of the copied image (MyDOS format, Mypicodos on it)...

 

Normally I create and/or copy 16MB ATR images (that contain files) with MakeATR 0.6 and similar tools on the PC, since this works way faster (a few seconds or minutes vs. several hours), but I guess, if you want to copy an existing 16MB image (with hundreds or thousands of files and dozens of subdirs) onto a real A8 harddisk, there is no better way than sector coyping it. But maybe SDX and the FAT16, FAT32 and APT tools can do it faster ? (Know nothing about SDX and FAT or APT tools, since I never used them.) How do other Atarians copy existing 16MB ATR images onto real A8 harddisks and how long does that take ?

 

@Mathy: Did not have the time to update my hundreds of ATR images to the newest Altirra Basic 1.56 or the newest MyPicodos 4.06, etc. and I am quite sure I will be too lazy for the next decades to do this. Only new programs that are added to my collection and saved as ATR images will get the newer versions...

16MB_Copy_end.zip

Edited April 28, 2019 by CharlieChaplin

[OmaOhneBH]

Aha, good that it works now - allthough it seems a bit strange to me that you have to press the "F" key several times...

 

Yeah, when booting from D4: (IDE partition) the MyPicoDos Menu still trys to load the subdirs from D1:, even though D1: is not connected - for some reason there seems to be no automatic recognition.

 

 

 

 

Even more strange, when the Error happened, the program not only showed the error message, but also asked "Continue?", when I did press the "Y" key it started reading from sector 1 again, which I immediately aborted by pressing the Reset key...

 

Same here on my first try.

 

 

 

 

Attached are two short videos (sorry for the bad quality, my digital camera is very old and does not have "shaking protection" and other nice things), video one shows the end of the copy process (empty sectors, so you only see the sector numbers changing on the badly flickering tv), while video two shows the booting of the copied image (MyDOS format, Mypicodos on it)...

 

Why the heck is there cassette loading sound in the videos?!

Edited April 28, 2019 by OmaOhneBH

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

I changed the sector copy program in such a way, that it makes tape loading noises...

 

Errmm no, my 1010 data recorder was loading a tape when I made the video (most likely Silent Service by Microprose). As mentioned before, the copy process of the 16MB image took approx. 6 hours with SIO2PC and in the meanwhile I continued working on my tape2disk project (which produces no CAS files, since I do not like them).

 

Think I have copied approx. 570 A8 tapes since last year and hope to reach 600 tapes by the end of the week. When finished some day, I will upload everything to either AA (Atari Age) or AOL (Atari OnLine.pl). The results of this tape2disk project will be a) self-running tape2disk bootdisks, b) self-running freezer-disks and c) DOS 2 disks with just the tape data on them... no CAS files.

 

Here are two photos of my small (10 square meters) Atari room, the first one shows the silver tv on the right which was used with SIO2PC to make the 16MB copy (+video) and to the left there is another tv connected to the A8 with 1050 floppy and 1010 data recorder (the one that made the noise). The second photo shows the opposite side of the room with my A8 shelves, alas, the room is so small, I have to make diagonal photos, so you can see at least half of the room. (to the right of the shelves is a large wardrobe which does not lead to Narnia and errm, to the right of the Atari and Hifi system there is a large desk with an old DOS PC and another Atari).

Edited April 28, 2019 by CharlieChaplin