[Coco] Copying CoCo diskettes to PC

[Walt Zydhek]

My utility, EmuDisk was written to also support physical floppies, give it a
try:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/emudisk/

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Mathieu Bouchard
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 5:16 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] Copying CoCo diskettes to PC


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