Archiving ST disks to CD-ROM

[Tickled_Pink]

I took on a large pile of floppies (2000+) from a friend a while ago and now need to offload most of them on eBay to make room. But before I do that I'd like to be able to archive them onto CD (he also gave me a CD-ROM drive for the ST which I've yet to use).

 

As I'll be doing the archiving on a PC, is there anything special I need to do or look out for when doing it? They'll ultimately be loaded from the ST's CD drive.

 

What about bootable disks? Anyone know of a way to archive those onto a CD so that they can be played on the ST later?

[[ProToS]]

no problem with *.msa or *.st img of disk

 

try with this tutorial :

http://home.tu-clausthal.de/~ifmar/makedisk/

[Tickled_Pink]

Doesn't seem to work correctly with XP Tried a few disks but keep getting errors with some (so many that I have to turn off the error reports) and images fail to load up on the emulators.

 

Anyone have a better idea?

 

I have a Sony VAIO notebook PC and was wondering if there's a way of reading the disks on the ST and connecting the two machines together for creating the images on the PC.

[Tickled_Pink]

Problem solved, I think. Using Windows Floppy Disk Copy and the first few I've done (ST User cover disks) load into Steem correctly.

[Trooper]

Hi!

 

I'm sorry to say this but unfortunately you won't be able to copy many disks that are using special formats so that kind of rules out most original games and loads of demos. To read them correctly you will have to, like you stated yourself, use the Atari drive to read them. The reason for this, as far as I know, is that the PC drives aren't able to read the formats of the ST disks other than the standard 720Kb format.

 

Please correct me if I'm wrong

 

/Troop

[Tickled_Pink]

You are correct, but almost all this disk collection I've inherited is ... shall we say ... somewhat less than original. Having said that, some have obviously been copied from an original with the aid of extra archiving hardware (such as a Happy), and these won't copy.

 

It's not too much of a problem, though, as I seem to have around 10 copies of Protext for example ... so at least one can be archived.

 

The technical side of these progs is easy to figure out, however. They simply detect the sectors, tracks and so forth from the header bytes of the boot sector from each disk and use that as a template for copying.

[Tickled_Pink]

Oh ... almost forgot. The FDC on a PC is programmable in the same way as the WD1772 (thinking back 10 years now to when I owned a copy of ST Internals) drive controller in the ST. So it can be programmed to read/write/format in some of the slightly odd disk formats you found on the ST (e.g. 82 tracks, 10 sectors per track).

[Trooper]

So that would mean you would be able to create a utility that CAN read all of these weird formats? Please do then since I'd almost be willing to pay a small amount of money for a util like that

[Tickled_Pink]

Well, to some degree it's true. I doubt it would be possible to get the PC's FDC to read copy protected disks properly. All I was saying was that the FDC can be programmed to read disks formatted in some of the more commonly used 'non-standard' disk formats often used to squeeze out more space on a floppy (i.e. the 800K+ formats, rather than the standard 720K).

 

As for me doing ANY programming on the PC ... no way!

 

One of the beauty of programming the ST in assembly as I used to do (been over 10 years now) was that it was sooo easy. My personal favourite experiments included creating my own Trap routines that could be used by both assembly and STOS programmers. I remember feeling especially pleased with myself when I worked out how STOS handled Trap calls - it was different to assembly and I had to write two seperate entry points to handle the different way that parameters were handled.

 

Oh what joyous times they were But I digress ...

 

With myself about to start the second year of my Law degree, developing a PHP web application for a friend's web site and having a 12 month old baby girl forever hanging around my ankles, any kind of programming on the ST/8-bit/2600 or PC is out of the question for the foreseable future ... although I have just been tidying up my Atari gear with a view to doing something with them to put something back into the Atari community as soon as I get five minutes.

[tjlazah]

There is an problem copying disks as you are all aware of. I have found a work around!

 

Normally in Windows 2000/XP you are not able to copy a disk other than 720k in my experience. What you need to do is boot with a DOS Boot Disk and use the MAKEDISK or STDISK util from the command prompt. This was the way I was able to transfer 360k to 830k images to DSDD Disks! NOTE: You may have to copy a 720k image to disk FIRST before other size formats will work, I guess the drive needs to be kicked into shape first or something...

 

The problem is the Floppy Drive Controller does not allow direct bangind to the drive in Windows, so you need to be in a pure DOS mode...

 

Enjoy