Date   : Thu, 03 Jun 1999 10:05:22 +0100 (BST)
From   : Andrew Benham <adsb@...>
Subject: Re: BBC software to grab DFS disc images

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Steven Flintham wrote:

> I'm thinking of (gradually!) copying all of my BBC discs onto my PC's
> hard disc, so that I don't need to worry about them dying of old age
> and so that I can use them conveniently in an emulator. Most of them
> are DFS (only 40T SS as well), so I thought I might as well store them
> as straight disc images - IIRC there's a `standard' format (.ssd/.dsd
> extension) for this. Assuming I'm not imagining it:
> 
> a) Is there any documentation on these formats around?
> 
> b) Has anyone got a program already written which will run on a BBC
> and create a file on one drive which is the disc image of a disc in
> another drive? It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but if I don't
> have to write it myself I stand less chance of getting the format
> wrong and having to munge all my images to make them compatible with
> emulators later on.

I have a program which will send an ADFS disk image over the serial
port using the XMODEM protocol. This was a trial of how to backup my
BBC hard disk to a PC, but proved too slow to be useful (4 hours for
17 MBytes). It would be possible to modify it to read DFS disks, and
sending a floppy wouldn't take too long.

--
Andrew Benham   adsb@...