Splitting up Disk Images into Track and Sector Files

[Jeff]

Some people here have been re-building floppies from floppy image files. This involves splitting the image up into track and sector files and then serially transferring them to a host and writing the track and sector chunks one by one. The splitting up task is somewhat tedious, so I wrote a program to do it! I have split up all the OS images I can find and posted them on my web server for all to enjoy. If there is an image that I haven't split, feel free to send it to me and I will split it and add it.

http://www.jeffferguson.ca/OSI/OS_Disk_Images/

Enjoy
/Jeff

[dave]

Hi Jeff,

I think this is very useful to all of us, and is a big step in the right direction, many thanks.

I think it would be really awesome to have an automated tool consisting of a slave program on the OSI that would exchange data between disk sectors / tracks and the host, under control of host commands over the serial port; and a host PC program that can read and write valid disk images, and clean up "dirty" raw images (for example, with garbage bytes between sectors), convert between 5.25" and 8" formats, etc. Perhaps also read and write an editable JSON or XML format as well, so images could be constructed or modified by hand more easily.

It would also be nice to use a CRC to ensure that the serial transmissions are good, and to verify disk writes. In fact, it would not be too hard add a CRC into the OS65D format in a compatible way, either by just adding an extra few bytes (ID + CRC) at the end of each sector, or before the sector tags; these would be ignored by standard OS65D read/write routines.

Dave

[BillO]

Hi Jeff,

Is your website down?

[Jeff]

My router packed it in yesterday and I haven't set up the new one to port forward to my server. I will set it up first thing tomorrow.

Thanks for the notice.
/Jeff

[Jeff]

Website back up
/Jeff

[BillO]

Thanks Jeff!