I was recently trying to to restore some 2.88 disk images but I do not have access to a single 2.88 floppy.
This is when my very old Atari ST habits kicked in. A common thing to do on the Atari was to over-format low density floppies with extra tracks & sectors to extract the last bit of storage space, at the cost of reliability.
So I found a good quality 1.44 floppy, covered up the HD identity hole and cut out an identical size ED identity hole just below it. This fools the drive hardware into thinking that it has a 2.88 floppy in it. I tried to format this floppy from the desktop, but it would not let me select 2.88. I then formatted it from the command line while forcing the 2.88 capacity. On the first format attempt it choked, spewed out an error and re-calibrated. On the second attempt it worked!
I was then able to use the hacked 1.44 floppy to restore a number of 2.88 images onto it, then copy the files from the floppy to the hard disk.
I would imagine that the quality of the 1.44 floppy will ultimately determine the success rate with this approach.
Nice little hack... I loathe using floppies but that does seem useful. You do know you could mount the floppies in a NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP vm to do the same thing right? (just copy via nfs/ftp over to your NeXT box).
You can also loopmount the floppy images (and cdrom images, etc) on linux with:
mount -t ufs -o loop, ufstype=next yourfloppy.img /mnt/
I tried that first in a Ubuntu VM, but it did not work. Only later I realized that the images I was trying to restore were not raw dumps but rather were created with DiskCopy II. So using floppies was the only option, since the proprietary image format has not been reverse engineered. I now have images in both formats so perhaps one day I can compare the binary images to identify the differences...
Quote from: "Noth"Nice little hack... I loathe using floppies but that does seem useful. You do know you could mount the floppies in a NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP vm to do the same thing right? (just copy via nfs/ftp over to your NeXT box).
You can also loopmount the floppy images (and cdrom images, etc) on linux with:
mount -t ufs -o loop, ufstype=next yourfloppy.img /mnt/
correct option is ufstype=nextstep
option ro for read only may be mandatory also (depending on your kernel/modules)
mount -t ufs -o "loop,ufstype=nextstep,ro" yourfloppy.img /mnt/