*me, staring at a 360KB floppy disk image for a MS-DOS program on archive.org* wtf do i do with this? run an emulator and try and mount it... then copy the file i want?
Wait A Sec...
*macOS* Just Opens and mounts the image in finder. Because of course, it's a FAT12, just like a USB thumb drive.
Thank you, @JennyFluff !
This is really cool! You did an amazing job preserving these disks! Everything installed flawlessly on my virtual WfW 3.11. Appears to be a special "Star Trek" version of AfterDark 3.01. However, there are a several bad sectors on one of the disks' FAT, but these do not interfere with the setup process.
#AfterDark #RetroComputing #86Box #Emulation #DiskImageTool #FAT12 #FloppyDisk
Another bad retro diskette! At first glance, this one seemed pretty much gone. None of my disk imaging tools were able to read it. Windows Explorer just crashed.
Only a low level KryoFlux dump managed to uncover the physical cause behind this: A corrupt root directory beyond any chance of repair. Luckily, both the file allocation tables as well as most of the data clusters were still in good shape. I used a hex editor to manually recover all the files from the valid tracks. It worked!
I guess these games are nothing special, but it still made me happy to pull usable data and working files from such a destroyed file system!
#RetroComputing #FloppyDisk #KryoFlux #DataRecovery #MSDOS #86Box #FAT12
@torepang You forgot some more #cursedness:
- compiled against #MSVC and #Microsoft #Libraries, so it requires #VisualStudio on #Windows to be built and requires all apps to be linked against these libraries.
- no user accounts, everything runs on root with no password.
- SMF (Solaris) as Init & Config System.
- Keyboard is hardcoded German Neo-2 Layout.
- uses #LILO / #LOADLIN on a #FAT12 Filesystem for boot, requiring a #MSDOS Boot Floppy!
- Only supports #NTFS as filesysten.
- All manpages are in Simplified Chinese.
- System clock is local time, not Unix Time.
- Only supports #ISA & #PCI, not #PCIe or #USB!
- curl points to wget, wget points to curl.
- emacs points to neovim, nvim points to emacs.
- forced UTF-32 encoding fir everything.
- Filenames, Directories & Path must only contain Emojis and . (or / for paths).
- Files are not overwritten but instead a new copy is made and the latest version is symlinked to the original filename - like in Files-11 for VAX/VMS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11
...
- - -
#retro time: Reimplementing some #DOS stuff.
I completed my first successful file read attempts of a #FAT12 #floppy image with my BIOS/DOS-compatible disk tools.
I hope this step will bring me closer to a backup of the boot files of my saved 40 year old #Toshiba T300 model with its non standard 5.25 floppy disk formats.
It would be amazing if I could create an artificial standard boot disk with those special toshiba-DOS system files on it.
For anyone woundering "why do you use the latest @linux #Kernel release?"
Well, I want OS/1337 to be basically 'rolling release' in that I can't be bothered #backporting stuff and I just want to pull the #releases straight from said projects.
https://github.com/OS-1337/OS1337/blob/main/build/0.CORE/build/sources.list.tsv
* Okay, I've not listed #syslinux & #mkdosfs and #dd which I used in making the #Floppy image but those basically don't really change much at all. We all know how #FAT12 works...
For now I'm only focusing on making something that generates FEFS24 images (24-bit pointers). That covers 99.99% of #Psion Flash and ROM SSDs.
I've only ever seen a handful of very early (1989) Type I Flash SSDs using FEFS32, and they were made by Psion themselves for the #MC200 and #MC400.
Once I've nailed FEFS24, FEFS32 will be much easier.
RAM SSDs use #FAT12, so that's a whole different ballgame. So far I've just used mtools to generate working FAT12 volumes.
David JONES
DesertFOX
Kevin Karhan 
GateLinker
Kevin Karhan 
The Last Psion | Alex