On OS X, which of course has a BSD-derived layer, I wasn't able to get anything using dd — my USB floppy drive showed up as a block device and exposed only the PC-style double density sectors as blocks. I was able successfully to image any disk that didn't use any of its tenth-per-track sectors, but that's the full extent of it.
The Kyroflux, at about £80, doesn't actually look like a bad deal, but can I attach a Disciple/+D drive to it? It looks to be the same sort of connector, and to match the one I had on my Acorn Electron +3 (equivalent) cartridge, but is it? On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 9:54 AM, nev young <[email protected]> wrote: > On 22/07/11 15:38, Dicky Moore wrote: >> >> Hey all >> >> Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or >> .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? >> > Very little hope of doing that. > > All the programs I've seen, or written myself, need to access the floppy > disk controller which you usually can not do through usb. > > If your PC has a floppy controller I would suggest connecting a floppy drive > directly to that, (possibly hanging out of the side and balanced on a pile > of books) to do the copy. Then put your machine back together again. > > If you really want to use the usb floppy drive then if you're feeling very > strong hearted you might try running a linux system and using the dd > utility. Something like: > dd noerror if=/dev/fda of=~/image.txt > > Tell it to ignore errors, as on a 1.44Mb disk it will expect 18** sectors > per track. So the last 8 will error. I've never tried this so can not vouch > for if it would work. Even if it does you'll have to play about with the > image to make it usable. > > > ** I think a 1.44Mb disk has 2 sides of 80 tracks with 18 sectors of 512 > bytes but I may be wrong. > > Nev >
