[Coco] SuperIDE, compact flash, and Linux

[Rich Carreiro]

If any of you use Cloud-9's SuperIDE controller with
a CF card, and also have a Linux box, I'm curious
about some potential backup/restore/transfer operations.

1) Will doing stuff like:
     dd if=/dev/whatever of=cocoflash.bak
  for a whole card backup, and
     dd if=cocoflash.bak of=/dev/whatever
  for a whole card restore work?

2) Is the size of a HDB-DOS virtual floppy (as it is
  laid out on the CF card) always the same size, no
  matter how much or how little is on the floppy?
  If so (assume for now that size is 158K), can
  you backup/extract drive 10 (i.e. 11th floppy) with
     dd bs=158K if=/dev/whatever of=floppy10.dsk skip=10
  and can you restore/"mount" floppy #10 with
     dd bs=158K if=floppy10.dsk of=/dev/whatever seek=10

3) If you can do (2), can you do something like that to
   transfer a .dsk you downloaded (or created via an
   emulator or when using Rainbow IDE) onto the CF card?
   Or do those DSK files have "extra" stuff in that that's
   used by the emulators and cannot be used "as-is" by
   a real CoCo?  I've also notices that some DSK files I've
   seen online aren't the full 158K.

4) I'm also curious to know how/if you can do this stuff
   from a Windows system.

Thanks!

--
Rich Carreiro                            rlcarr at rlcarr.com