Re: ProDOS driver for linux...?

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com <josephoswald@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You could use the "loopback" option to mount disk images.
>>
>> If it included Mac partitioning support, you could use an Apple II hard drive.

> I'm not very experienced with Linux device drivers and file system;
> however, isn't there a low-level device driver that could scoop raw
> blocks off the device into a file (using dd?) on a Linux-supported file
> system, which would be readable by user-land utilities?
> 
> It's not 100% necessary to create a fully-functional file system to
> mount the ProDOS directory tree in the Linux directory tree.

You can use "dd" to read raw blocks off of a hard drive.  Most emulators
aren't set up to handle partitioned images though, so to create .PO
images for an emulator you'd have to extract the partitions.  You might be
able to accomplish this with the HFS driver.

However, reading 512 bytes from offset N works exactly the same whether
you're opening /dev/sda or /home/foo/bar.po (access permissions aside).
The loopback option to the "mount" command allows you to mount a file
as if it were a device.  I use it to view the contents of CD-R .ISO images,
e.g. "mount ./cdimg.iso /mnt/test -t iso9660 -o loop".

The filesystem code has just as much to do, whether it's working on a
physical disk or a disk image.

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