Atari-Forum

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

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: 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): 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