On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Joe wrote:
> >Not much. Put an ST506 controller into a PC. ST506/412 was the defacto
> >standard on PCs until IDE. although most PC people erroneously refer to
> >the cabling and interface as "MFM". The controllers used by IBM in the XT
> >were made by Xebec.
> >Once you have a controller and drive in your PC, you can write the code to
> >read and write sectors to be able to copy a drive.
> I don't think youd even have to write any code. You could boot it from a
> DOS disk and use Debug to read the raw disk sectors and write them to the
> new drive.
Unfortunately, the R command in DEBUG in MS/PC-DOS will balk at reading
even raw sectors if it doesn't see an MS/PC-DOS style partition table in
the first sector of the drive, and an MS/PC-DOS style "boot record" in the
first sector of each partition.
There have also been variations in sector size and sector numbering that
will stop the R command of DEBUG. (MS/PC-DOS uses 512 bytes per sector,
and the sectors on hard drives are numbered 1 - 17) If the alien system
numbers 0 - 16, or uses a sector other than 512 bytes, then DEBUG won't be
happy.
But it IS possible to read a lot of stuff other than MS/PC-DOS
using INT 13h
--
Fred Cisin cisin_at_xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
Received on Mon Aug 04 2003 - 20:09:00 BST