Re: Reading Apple2 floppies on a PC using Disk2FDI

["Tim Haynes" <timhaynes@no.spam.please.alumni.uwaterloo.ca>]

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

Cheers
Tim

"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:
>
> 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
>