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  • archiving floppy disks, natively on CP/M

    From Jeff Jonas@21:1/5 to All on Mon Nov 18 16:23:33 2024
    I still have a Z80 CP/M SBC (single board computer).
    When I decommissioned it, I used the modem/file transfer program
    to xmodem-batch send all the files to PROCOMM on a MS-DOS PC.

    I plan to reconstruct that setup
    but this time to Linux using rz:
    rx, rb, rz - XMODEM, YMODEM, ZMODEM (Batch) file receive

    What of the boot tracks?
    Is there any CP/M equivalent to Unix/Linux "dd"
    or hex dump?

    I have a greaseweazle but have not set up the toolchain.
    Most of my CP/M floppies are NOT bootable
    so archiving the files is fine.

    thanks
    --

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  • From David Schultz@21:1/5 to Jeff Jonas on Mon Nov 18 12:19:10 2024
    On 11/18/24 10:23 AM, Jeff Jonas wrote:
    What of the boot tracks?
    Is there any CP/M equivalent to Unix/Linux "dd"
    or hex dump?
    I don't know about the other versions, but CP/M-68K included:


    "COPY is a track-by-track disk copying program that can copy the
    operating system loader and utility programs from your system disk. COPY creates a complete and exact copy of your system disk."

    The C source for this is available.

    -
    http://davesrocketworks.com
    David Schultz

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  • From Jacob Nevins@21:1/5 to Jeff Jonas on Mon Nov 18 20:54:57 2024
    Jeff Jonas <[email protected]> writes:
    I still have a Z80 CP/M SBC (single board computer).
    When I decommissioned it, I used the modem/file transfer program
    to xmodem-batch send all the files to PROCOMM on a MS-DOS PC.

    I plan to reconstruct that setup
    but this time to Linux using rz:
    rx, rb, rz - XMODEM, YMODEM, ZMODEM (Batch) file receive

    What of the boot tracks?
    Is there any CP/M equivalent to Unix/Linux "dd"
    or hex dump?

    I have a greaseweazle but have not set up the toolchain.

    I use 'auxd', the serial port server from John Elliott's libdsk suite,
    to let libdsk tools running on a Linux PC to pull full disc images over
    a serial link from the CP/M machine. https://www.seasip.info/Unix/LibDsk/index.html#auxd
    (On an Amstrad PCW, so I've not tried the generic CP/M version
    AUXDCPM.COM.)

    (Obviously this won't be as high-fidelity as a flux image from something
    like a Greaseweazle.)

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  • From Tony Nicholson@21:1/5 to Jeff Jonas on Tue Nov 19 08:07:15 2024
    On 19/11/2024 3:23 am, Jeff Jonas wrote:

    Is there any CP/M equivalent to Unix/Linux "dd"
    or hex dump?

    Back when I wanted to make images of my eight-inch floppies (in Dave
    Dunfield's Image Disk format - or .IMD files) I adapted the disk copy
    program for a Compupro/Godbout Disk-1 controller to produce a program
    called D2IMD. It is able to read a disk image from one drive and write
    an .IMD disk image file to the other drive. Usually the image fits due
    to detection of adjacent identical content sectors (e.g. those that
    contain 0xE5 bytes from formatting) which are stored a "Compressed" in
    the IMD file - but in the event that the IMD file fills the output disk,
    it closes the file and prompts for a second "continuation" volume. When
    you transfer the multivolume files to your Linux/macOS system - just concatenate them to get a complete .IMD image file. I've used these
    images successfully to boot floppy images under a suitably configured
    SIMH AltairZ80 simulator running on my Mac and Linux computers.

    D2IMD is system specific and embeds a copy of the disk controller
    portion of the CP/M-Plus BIOS into the program. If you have the sources
    to the CP/M-Plus BIOS for your single-board computer you should be able
    to adapt it to be used by D2IMD. The source-code is up on GitHub in the
    d2imd folder at -


    https://github.com/agn453/CPM-UG-Disks

    Tony

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  • From John@21:1/5 to Douglas Miller on Fri Feb 14 13:30:17 2025
    On 11/18/24 4:47 PM, Douglas Miller wrote:


    Digital Research did not provide any such utility, the closest being SYSGEN.COM which is actually something vendors were expected to customize. But the general code to do a raw read of a disk is pretty boiler-plate.

    What I did way back when was to write a simple program to read the entire disk (raw) and dump in HEX out a serial port. I then captured that output
    on Linux, after which it was a fairly simple matter to turn that HEX dump into a binary file that cpmtools can use (or potentially anything like an
    IMD image). I don't know if I can locate any of that (from 25 years ago),
    but it is not too difficult to reconstruct.

    I recall doing something similar in ages past. I had an Osborne 01
    running CPM 2.2 and I essentially did a track by track read (like the
    included COPY program)and fed the binary to XMODEM (I had the source
    code for that) that was then received by my PC running Procomm. Didn't
    need to bother with hex as an intermediate step.

    I still have the Osborne, but now it has a Gotek flash drive in place of
    drive B. And of course a recapped power supply.

    -John

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