[Coco] SuperIDE, compact flash, and Linux

[Boisy Pitre]

> 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?

Absolutely.  It's a fantastic way to make a quick backup of your CF.

>
> 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

The size is dependent upon the sector size of the CF (almost always  
512 bytes/sector).  HDB-DOS uses the first 256 bytes of the 512 byte  
sector and ignores the second half, so you really would need to set  
bs=322560 (315K)

> 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.

You would have to pad each 256 bytes with an additional 256 bytes to  
adhere to the 512 byte sector requirement of CF cards.  ToolShed's  
decb utility has an option to do this (decb hdbconv).

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

ToolShed runs under Windows, I believe, but I don't attend to that  
port.  I'm not sure what the status is (I'm Mac only).

>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Rich Carreiro                            rlcarr at rlcarr.com
>
>
> d
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