Writing ST disks with linux..ANY IDEAS???

[pw]

Hello,

Is there any way to write diskettes for ST with linux?
When I attempt to format diskettes with linux mkdosfs -A
It won't even format a disk. There are also no options for
mounting an ST floppy on linux.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for any info,

Pete

[thothy]

Writing ST floppies with Linux works quite fine for me. Asuming that you have a "good" floppy drive (i.e. not an USB floppy drive etc.), try the following:

1) The disk image should be in plain *.ST format. If it is a MSA image, use my msa-to-st converter first (http://www.uni-ulm.de/~s_thuth/ix/msa-0.1.0.tar.gz).
2) Find out the size in kB of the ST disk image and search for the corresponding floppy device in the /dev folder. E.g. use /dev/fd0u720 for 720kB disk images and /dev/fd0u800 for 800kB images.
3) Format the destination disk to this format, e.g. use "fdformat /dev/fd0u720" or use "superformat" if you are using Debian.
4) Write the ST disk image to the floppy:

Code: Select all

dd if=/home/xxx/source.st of=/dev/fd0u720 bs=512

Note that you normally have to be "root" to access the floppy devices in /dev.

Mounting a ST disk image is also quite easy (as long as there is a valid MS-DOS compatible file system on the disk image):

Code: Select all

mount -o loop -t msdos source.st /mnt

This mounts the source.st disk image to the /mnt folder. You also need to be root to do that. As an alternative, you can also use the programs from the "mtools" package to access the contents of a floppy disk image.

Hope that helps,
Thothy