Re: Reading Sam Floppies

[Thomas Harte]

 Alas, neither SamDsk nor SamDisk seem to want to work on my shiney new PC
 (running Windows XP).
 
 Is it just me?
 Is there another tool out there I'm missing that'll do the job?

No, due to extra controls excerted, including DOS programs, by NT/2000/XP the 
direct 
hardware access that these programs use will not work. But the situation is 
worse than 
that - Microsoft have included no method to directly access the sectors on 
floppy discs in 
anything other than the DOS sizes and shapes, which means it is impossible to 
get at the 
SAM's tenth sector. Although smart people, including Simon Owen, are working on 
ways 
to patch various parts of the OS to enable that sort of access, at the minute 
no tool for 
NT/2000/XP is technically possible.

But the moral is that it almost certainly isn't a hardware problem, so if you 
can get a 
DOS boot disc you should still be okay. http:://www.freedos.org may be some 
help.

While I'm here, does SAMDSK work in a DOS box in Windows 95 for anyone here? 
For 
me it crashes instantly with the usual DJGPP shape trace info, but works fine 
from vanilla 
DOS. Is there a work around for this?

-Thomas
__
Free Email - http://www.lycos.co.uk/service/lycosmail/
The funniest email attachments on the web - http://viral.lycos.co.uk

RE: Reading Sam Floppies

[Simon Owen]

Tim P wrote:
 Alas, neither SamDsk nor SamDisk seem to want to work on my 
 shiney new PC (running Windows XP).
 
 Is it just me?

It's not just you - none of the existing tools work with NT/W2K/XP,
they're DOS/9x/Me only.


 Is there another tool out there I'm missing that'll do the job?

I've got a test driver which already works with the current Win32
SimCoupé, to allow access to regular format real floppies on NT4/W2K/XP.
It's not supplied with the normal download as it's still experimental,
but will probably do what you need (let me know if you want to try it).
As well as directly manipulating files on disk, you can effectively
image the real floppy by inserting a blank floppy image into drive 2 and
doing a BACKUP d1 to d2 in MasterDOS.

I'd also been working on a SAMDisk library, to give a common interface
to SAM disks on all platforms.  However, that's on hold for now as SAM
disk support may be added to libdsk
(http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Unix/LibDsk/) instead, with the completed
driver becoming part of that.  That said, the current libdsk version
doesn't seem to handle non-regular geometry disks too well, so protected
SAM disks can't be handled just yet.

Si