[Coco] Moving from SyQuest EZ-135 to CompactFlash

[James Dessart]

On 17-May-04, at 11:43 AM, tim lindner wrote:

> I would be interested to know how to read raw data off a CompachFlash
> card using Mac OS X.

Well, I'm hoping I'm right, but when the card is inserted to the reader 
(or attached to the IDE adaptor) it should appear in the IORegistry. 
The Finder may ask you to format it, which wouldn't be too good. :)

However, using command line tools, you should be able to use dd (same 
as on linux) to just read out the raw data. The main complication is 
finding out the UNIX path to the device, which the IO registry may tell 
you. You can compare before and after media insertion IORegistry trees 
by running ioreg at the command line, and sending output to a file, 
then using diff. Here's an example:

Before CF card is attached to Mac:
bash% ioreg > before-insertion

After CF card is attached:
bash% ioref > after-insertion
bash% diff before-insertion after-insertion

And you should get a listing of the differences. This will usually just 
be things related to the insertion of the CF media. Next you want to 
run "ioreg -c IOMedia" and in there, for the proper device, you'll find 
the BSD Name property. That gives you the file, under /dev, that 
represents the disk. You can use this as input to dd as the source. 
It's been a while since I've used dd, but there's a man page, so you 
should be able to use that to figure it out.

James