Re: Reading Apple2 floppies on a PC using Disk2FDI

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Tim Haynes wrote:

>"Oliver Schmidt" <ol.sc@web.de> wrote in message
>news:cf56ib$b0j$1@online.de...
>> 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:

<snip detailed instructions>

>> 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 !
>
>Great work, Oliver!  Anybody care to duplicate his success??

Oliver inspired me to set up an older PC with 3.5" and 5.25"
drives and give it a try.

I had some confusion and very limited success.

First, what is the option flag "O" that Oliver used?  I can't find it
in the DISK2FDI documentation.

When I used "/S16 /D" for the option string, things started to work,
but the program hung asking for a formatted disk in A:, which
contained the boot disk!

If I manually ejected the boot disk, getting an "Abort, Retry, Fail"
message, and then re-inserted the disk into the (still running) drive,
then answered R)etry, it would happily process track 0, reporting
it as a standard DOS 3.3+ track.

The program then hung again.  Repeating the above process let
it read track 1, too, then subsequent tracks came up "16 bad sectors".

Since this is a freshly written ProDOS diskette, and all sectors
verify on an Apple II, I'm at a loss to understand what is going on.

-michael

Check out parallel computing for 8-bit Apples on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/