[Coco] Copying CoCo diskettes to PC

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Hi, I'm new here and I have just tried transferring CoCo diskettes (5¼") 
to a PC, but it does not work.

I first tried using Linux, with the setfdprm command, but when I tried 
copying a diskette (formatted with the ordinary DECB FAT8 filesystem) 
using the dd command, I got a series of errors always on the same sector 
numbers and the copy always aborted without having copied anything at all.

So I tried DOS. I found COCOUTIL.EXE on an old floppy that also had a 
PCDOS 2.1 kernel. It seemed to work, so I spent a lot of time making a DOS 
partition on the harddisk and installing a recent enough DOS so that I 
could use that partition as a buffer for later transferring those files to 
Linux. Then I found out that CocoUtil is NOT able to read those files : it 
always says « sector not found » on any file. What made it seem to work at 
first is that it's able to list the directory, but it seems that it's the 
only thing that it's able to do.

I thought about using a Disto double disk drive, and even though it's 
possible to open its case and unplug internally one of the drives to plug 
a PC diskette cable in its place, because both use the same 34-pin 
connector, it seems that it's NOT pin-compatible with the PC plug.

So, what do I need to do ? Buy PC diskette drives until I find one that 
works ? Something else ?

Obviously, if I can't read from such a diskette, I can't write either, and 
so I can't easily add new software on that CoCo. I have UltimaTerm 4.1 but 
no suitable cable for connecting the serial cable to a PC...

I have several hundred DECB FAT8 diskettes, several tens other that are 
formatted as OS9, and a few that are formatted as ColorLogo, and ideally 
I'd like to transfer everything to a PC, as a backup, and eventually to 
feed the files (or disk images) to an emulator.

Thanks in advance for any help.

  ______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC