Date   : Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:57:25 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: ADFS 'D' format ?

Andrew Benham wrote:
> Now that I've found how to read my BBC ADFS (and DFS) disks
> under Linux (http://www.adsb.co.uk/bbc/linux/), I'm thinking
> about writing the missing 'oldadfs' Linux kernel module
> (see 
> http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/linux-arm/2002-November/004519.html) 

Hmm, I was pondering the same thing (and doing one for DFS media) but I'm 
leaning toward doing everything in user-land as it's more flexible (I'll 
mainly be working from disk images until I can get my head around writing a 
linux raw floppy driver that's a bit more flexible)

At the moment I've got some user-land code written that'll autodetect the 
filesystem type held within a disk image and act accordingly, producing native 
files on the host machine from the data held in a disk image [1]. At the 
moment I've just worried about DFS filesystems, but 80% of the effort's been 
in getting all the framework in place, so adding ADFS support should be easy.

[1] Currently using Dave Dunfield's Imagedisk format as the Imagedisk tool is 
far better at analysis and error recovery than anything written against the 
current Linux floppy driver could ever be, and the file format itself supports 
recording of unreadable sectors etc.

No reason I can't support other disk image formats, though.


My main reason for doing all of this is that I get so many floppies coming in 
that *might* have interesting / useful Acorn data on - but they're often 
totally unlabelled as to geometry and filesystem format and it's such a pain 
to try and trawl through them all on all possible vintage hardware (eg. quite 
a few ex-Acorn disks I have are Olivetti 3b2 format, and aren't even Acorn 
format at all). Being able to chuck a random disk in the drive of a modern 
machine, hit 'go', and get a bunch of native files out the other end will save 
me a lot of hassle!

cheers

Jules