Using Gouda SCSI MSX-partitioned Iomega Zip disk images in BlueMSX

بواسطة GNF

Rookie (23)

10-10-2011, 23:59

Hi,

A while ago I found some old 100MB Iomega Zip disks in my attic. As far as I can tell they are my old dev disks with all of my unfinished ASCII-C projects.

My setup was a customized ATX-tower containing a Philips NSM8255 motherboard, a slotexpander containing DOS2.20 and an MSX Club Gouda -NOVAXIS- SCSI connected to a 3.5" IOMEGA zip drive and an internal HDD.

I remember the ZIP disks being partitioned with 4 MSX partitions of 3x32MB and a partition for the leftover space. In it's current state I cannot use this setup (MSX battery is dead, no keyboard, no screen) and even if I did, I do not have any means of copying the data to my PC other than via FDD (not an option). I do not own any SCSI hardware anymore so I can't hook up the HDD to a PC either. I do however own an old USB zipdrive that can be hooked up to my laptop.

Since I am natively a windows user I tried booting my laptop with knoppix with the usb zip drive connected. I then used DD to copy an image of the ZIP disk to file. Then I tried selecting this image in BlueMSX for the Gouda SCSI. But it doesn't work. For now I'm to lazy to do a sector by sector comparison of my image vs an (empty) image generated in BlueMSX to see what's wrong.

Anybody know if there are any tools to convert a DD generated image to blue-MSX Gouda SCSI-format? Is there some header I should strip/add? Are there some specific options I should use with DD? Or am I going at it all wrong?

I'm at a loss here. Some help/tips would be appreciated.

GNF

بواسطة RetroTechie

Paragon (1563)

11-10-2011, 00:40

Since I am natively a windows user I tried booting my laptop with knoppix with the usb zip drive connected. I then used DD to copy an image of the ZIP disk to file.
'Close, but no sigar'

An emulator wants an image of a disk volume, for floppies this is the same as 'entire disk', but harddisks have this thing called partitions. What you did was make an image of the entire ZIP disk. What you want to do, is make images of the individual partitions on that ZIP disk.

Suppose your ZIP disk is seen as "/dev/sdc". If you do 'fdisk -l /dev/sdc', you will see a listing of those partitions, their sizes, types, boot flag etc. If you have >4 partitions (or partitioned the ZIP disk using Windows/MS-DOS), there might be an extended partition that acts as a 'container' for some of the other partitions. You can tell this apart by having a good look at start/end/size data. In your case, you might see something like:

/dev/sdc1 32M (=1st MSX partition)
/dev/sdc2 68M (=extended partition that holds the rest, you don't care about it really)
/dev/sdc5 32M (=2nd MSX partition)
/dev/sdc6 32M (=3rd MSX partition)
/dev/sdc7 4M (=4th MSX partition)

In this example you'd want to do 'dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/path/to/your/Windows/disk/MSX_part1.img', and repeat that for sdc5, sdc6 and sdc7. Linux 'dd' utility is a simple but universal tool that's very suited for this kind of thing, no need for the myriad of specialist utils on Windows (that may or may not be helpful)...

P.S. On machines that don't have Linux installed, I prefer Puppy Linux for tasks like the above. Small, boots quickly, and since you run as root, no fuss about access rights. But Knoppix is fine too. Just be careful what you're doing, and use '--help' option, 'man <command>' or 'info <command>' first for any command you're not sure about...