Date   : Mon, 06 Aug 2012 22:23:21 +0100
From   : jgh@... (J.G.Harston)
Subject: ANN: AFSFiler

Rob wrote:
> I've been meaning to write something similar for the last 20 years!  
> I
> have my old L3FS hard drive here still - it's got a busted front
> directory, so needs something to access it directly

Oo, that's a good idea. A quick tweek, and you can now select a 
directory
with it's SIN by prefixing it with a '&', eg DIR &42F. You'll get 'Bad 
map'
if you try to catalog a directory that isn't really a directory, but it
will let you step through a broken directory tree.

It would be useful if I add the BLOCK command from CPMFiler which dumps 
a
disk block, allowing you to examine the low-level disk contents.

> Will it work with Filestore E20 drives?

It should do, As far as all the documentation I've examined says, the
FileStore just uses a L3FS filesystem, and documentation makes me
understand that a FileStore hard drive is just a BBC SCSI drive, so
is pluggable into a BBC SCSI hard drive interface.

If not, find a computer with a SCSI interface that you can use to
create a disk image, and the access the disk image with AFSFiler.

This all started with me writing CPMFiler years'n'years ago to extract
files from my CPM disks. It was followed by SJFiler about ten years
ago that let me recover lots of files from my MDFS floppies after my
MDFS's floppy interface stopped working. I then adapted it to create
L2Filer to recoved the contents from my Level2FS disks.

Quickly followed up with UnixFiler to access PDP-11 Unix disk images
when I started developing my PDP-11 BBC BASIC and needed to manipulate
files in a disk image to boot Unix from.

USBFiler followed quickly in the wake of Sprow's DataCentre to navigate
the filesystem on USB devices.

Then these last few weeks, L2Filer became AFSFiler with the addition of
being able to access Level2FS disks.

Almost every step has included me documenting the filesystem structure 
as
I went along ;)  There are still a handful of bytes in the MDFS 
filesystem
that I don't know what they are. (mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format)

-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...      - mdfs.net