FAQ Material!

[carbide@egine.com]

Reposting of Oliver's message on how to read Apple disks on a PC.

From: ol.sc@web.de
Subject: Reading Apple2 floppies on a PC using Disk2FDI
Newsgroups: comp.emulators.apple2
Date: 10-Aug-2004 23:19:23

Hi,

now and then somebody asks here about reading Apple floppies on a PC
for converting them to disk images usable with Apple2 emulators.

Considered impossible for more than a decade this is in fact possible
with Disk2FDI available at http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi. Because
of the several scenarios and usecases described I found the Disk2FDI
docs a little confusing. Therefore I'd like to share my personal
experience with Disk2FDI:

My original setup was quite common. A single 3,5" floppy drive and a
"modern" Windows on the hard disk completely formatted with NTFS. BTW:
The following should be identical for Linux users.

1. I got myself an old 5,25" 1,2 MB floppy drive from TEAC. The
Disk2FDI docs say that for our usecase any 5,25" drive will work.

2. I noticed that my floppy drive cable had only connectors for 3,5"
drives so I had to get one with at least one connector for a 5,25"
drive.

3. I installed the 5,25" drive and connected it as drive B: (in other
words "in the middle" of the cable) leaving the existing 3,5"
connected as drive A: (at the end of the cable).

4. I added the 5,25" 1.2MB drive as second floppy drive into the BIOS
and made sure that booting from a floppy disk is generally enabled.

5. I created a MS-DOS bootdisk. The Disk2FDI docs say that images for
DOS bootdisks that are available at http://www.bootdisk.com/ in case
you shouldn't have MS-DOS at hand anymore.

6. I added the disk2fdi.com program to the bootdisk and rebooted my PC
from that bootdisk.

7. I write-protected the Apple2 floppy disk to read and inserted it
into the 5,25" drive.

8. I entered

disk2fdi /SDO16 b: mydisk.do

which successfully wrote a mydisk.do image to the 3,5" bootdisk. BTW:
This can be done for several images as a 1,44MB floppy disk has space
for many 140kB images.

9. I removed the 3,5" bootdisk and rebooted my PC from the hard disk
again.

10. I re-inserted the 3,5" bootdisk and finally copied the image(s) to
the hard disk.

Finally I'd like to thank Vincent Joguin for this great piece of
software !

Oliver