[Coco] Reading a SuperIDE Compact Flash

Aaron Wolfe aawolfe at gmail.com
Sun Apr 29 20:50:08 EDT 2012


On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 7:10 PM, Christopher Hawks <chawks at dls.net> wrote:
> Christopher Hawks said the following on 04/28/2012 06:58 PM:
>

> Syntax is:
> decb dir imagefile.dsk,:1+0x52ddc
>         imagename     :Drive+Offset(hex or decimal)
> or
> decb copy imagefile.dsk,filename:4+0x52ddc otherimage.dsk,newfile:250+339420
>
> Use the HDBDOS offset that the image was created with. My copy of HDBDOS
> uses 0x52ddc (or 339420 decimal).
>
> Drive number is required before HDBDOS Offset. If an offset is given, every
> other 'physical sector' is skipped like HDBDOS does.
>
> As always os9 dir -e imagefile.dsk will acces the OS9 partition at the
> beginning of the image.
>
> Works for Me! (tm)
>
>

Here is a (hopefully) very easy tool to put disks into and out of a
SuperIDE CF or HDD image:

https://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/sidewalk

It can work on the CF card directly or work on images created by dd,
win32diskimager etc.
On Windows systems it will read/write images to/from the CF for you, but haven't
found any reliable way
to detect where in the filesystem a CF card might live on Mac and
Linux boxes yet and I'm not brave enough to make a really easy GUI
tool with the potential to write over arbitrary filesystems :)

You can of course point it at the /dev/whatever if you happen to know though.
I would recommend much caution on writes (reads are harmless) until
more testing can happen, always always back up your
CF card before letting SIDEWalk change it until its proven.

the auto detection of os9 and hdbdos areas and filesystems is probably
not perfect.  I have only a couple CF cards to mess with so not sure
about a few details that might only have been coincidental in my tests.

Anyway... should work fine on windows, mac, linux, bsd, maybe others.
No install or any nonsense, just download and double click, at least that
works on Windows, Mac and Debian..  some linuxes don't play as
nicely with java as others.

Oh: one final note to any Windows users:  when you plug your CF card from the
SuperIDE into the PC, it may tell you that it has to format it so you
can use it.

DO NOT do that.  You *will* lose your data.   SIDEWalk does not need the device
to be formatted, it will talk to it just fine.

-Aaron



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