Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
Hey all Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? Samdisk doesn't support USB floppy drives and I'm not sure of any other software that can do this. I'm trying to recover all the E-tracker music I created back in the day. I'm trying to find an app that will make an image of the floppy disk, which then I maybe could mount that as a virtual floppy drive and samdisk could then work. No luck so far. Anyone have any ideas? Cheers Dicky -- Dicky Moore | Bearcraft 07702 100 180 http://dickymoore.co.uk/ http://dickymoore.co.uk | http://bearcraftmusic.com/ http://bearcraftmusic.com
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
Yes and no. Mostly no. http://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=28 is your best hope, I expect. Most standard USB floppy drives will only read standard disk formats, which means you won't be able to access the 10th sector on a Sam disk. No idea if the software works with Sam formats though. You're almost certainly better off dusting off an old DOS PC with an old-fashioned disk drive on it. Geoff On 22 July 2011 15:38, Dicky Moore dickymo...@gmail.com wrote: Hey all ** ** Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? ** ** Samdisk doesn’t support USB floppy drives and I’m not sure of any other software that can do this. ** ** I’m trying to recover all the E-tracker music I created back in the day. * *** ** ** I’m trying to find an app that will make an image of the floppy disk, which then I maybe could mount that as a virtual floppy drive and samdisk could then work. No luck so far. Anyone have any ideas? ** ** Cheers ** ** Dicky ** ** -- Dicky Moore | Bearcraft 07702 100 180 http://dickymoore.co.uk | http://bearcraftmusic.com ** **
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
Hi Dicky I remember this question from a few months back, especially because I've run out of space in my half height PC case too. The USB floppy drives simply aren't sophisticated enough to read non-standard disks, and never will be able to either. In order to run SamDisk you need to install an extra dll (I think?) to converse with the floppy drive controller, and that isn't connected with a USB port. Sorry about that! Howard Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -Original Message- From: Dicky Moore dickymo...@gmail.com Sender: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:38:26 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive Hey all Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? Samdisk doesn't support USB floppy drives and I'm not sure of any other software that can do this. I'm trying to recover all the E-tracker music I created back in the day. I'm trying to find an app that will make an image of the floppy disk, which then I maybe could mount that as a virtual floppy drive and samdisk could then work. No luck so far. Anyone have any ideas? Cheers Dicky -- Dicky Moore | Bearcraft 07702 100 180 http://dickymoore.co.uk/ http://dickymoore.co.uk | http://bearcraftmusic.com/ http://bearcraftmusic.com
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
I had only success using a slim line Parallel port floppy with my olt Travelmate TM 312T Subnotebook. 2011/7/22 toberm...@waitrose.com Hi Dicky I remember this question from a few months back, especially because I've run out of space in my half height PC case too. The USB floppy drives simply aren't sophisticated enough to read non-standard disks, and never will be able to either. In order to run SamDisk you need to install an extra dll (I think?) to converse with the floppy drive controller, and that isn't connected with a USB port. Sorry about that! Howard Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -- *From: * Dicky Moore dickymo...@gmail.com *Sender: * owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no *Date: *Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:38:26 +0100 *To: *sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no *ReplyTo: * sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no *Subject: *Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive Hey all ** ** Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? ** ** Samdisk doesn’t support USB floppy drives and I’m not sure of any other software that can do this. ** ** I’m trying to recover all the E-tracker music I created back in the day. * *** ** ** I’m trying to find an app that will make an image of the floppy disk, which then I maybe could mount that as a virtual floppy drive and samdisk could then work. No luck so far. Anyone have any ideas? ** ** Cheers ** ** Dicky ** ** -- Dicky Moore | Bearcraft 07702 100 180 http://dickymoore.co.uk | http://bearcraftmusic.com ** **
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
Dicky Moore wrote: Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? Samdisk doesn’t support USB floppy drives and I’m not sure of any other software that can do this. I'm afraid there's no way to do it with a standard USB floppy drive. It's a hardware limitation without any software work-arounds, so no other program can do it either. You'll either need a desktop PC with an on-board floppy controller, for SAMdisk use, or some special hardware that doesn't need a floppy controller chip (such as Kyroflux), which isn't cheap for one-off use. I’m trying to recover all the E-tracker music I created back in the day. If you don't have access to a PC that can do it, and you can get the disks to me, I can dump them for you. Alternatively, if you still have your real SAM then we can work around the sector 10 issue, using a spare floppy disk to hold a copy of the inaccessible sector 10s. Two 9-sector disks, which can be dumped on a USB drive, could be pieced back together to give the complete MGT 10-sector image. If you're still using your real SAM, you'd perhaps be better off with an Atom Lite board. You can copy your disks on to that very easily, and the Compact Flash card is easy to move back and forth between SAM and PC. SAMdisk can read extract disk images from it (or write them back), or you can use it directly in SimCoupe. If you want to try a SAM-side work-around, drop me an e-mail... Si
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
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
Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive
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 pasiphae1...@yahoo.co.uk 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
