At 16:54 13.08.2005 -0800, Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
Just to make sure: Does that mean that you can already read all the sectors from the disk?
Yes, I can. I'm using the Catweasel floppy controller to do that, as normal floppy controllers can't read FM disks any more. These VERSAdos disks are even a weird mixture of FM and MFM sectors, with 16 128-byte FM sectors on track 0/side 0, and 16 256-byte MFM sectors on all other tracks. I haven't seen an FM-track on a 3.5" disk before, and I've seen *many* disks in the past nine years. Luckily, the checksums are all CRC-16 according to CCITT, so once I found out about the basic format, the rest was easy.
So what you are looking for now is a way to interpret the file system on the disk?
Correct. I have no clue what VARSAdos is related to - some CP/M or early DOS? I only know that the volume name of the disk can only be 4 characters, and that's stored in the beginning of very first sector of the disk (that is, the first four bytes of my image file).
Thanks for your other hints - I have also seen quite a few filesystems before, but never really tried to hack one. One way or another, I managed to get hold of a documentation, so I had the positions for sector pointers, directory entries and so on.
Perhaps you should make a dump of the disk contents and give us (or some of us) access to it?
Sure, I can do that. Need to ask the owner of the disks first, but I guess that's not a problem, since the disks have been formatted for this purpose.
When the file system is very complicated, sometimes it is best to emulate the complete original OS on a modern PC and map a harddisk file as a quasi floppy drive.
That's what I recommend t most of my customers, and it works fine for those systems where an emulator exists - especially the popular ones like C64, Amiga, Atari and Apple. However, I haven't seen an emulator for this 68K-based realtime operating system yet, and I doubt that it really exists. Any hints welcome...!
ciao, -- Jens Schönfeld -- Author: Jens Schoenfeld INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Hosting, San Diego, California -- http://www.fatcity.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
