Hi all,
I am a long-time NeXT fan/user/enthusiast (nearly 25 years...) and also a Smalltalk fan/user/enthusiast.
I recently found some 2.88mb disk images of a Smalltalk interpreter for NeXTSTEP (with a .diskimage extension) in a NeXT software archive. I can provide links but it is also easily googled: "fsck.technology nextstep applications" -- it also contains AppSoft Image on a 2.88mb disk image.
Has anybody got any experience with using 2.88mb disk images? I've used the .floppyimage images for e.g. driver disks and install disks, but those are 1.44mb.
My VirtualBox setup doesn't accept these .diskimage files as legitimate file systems, and rejects them.
So then I thought I'd attach blank 2.88mb files to the virtual floppy drive and then dd the diskimages onto them from within my OPENSTEP VM. Unfortunately, my OPENSTEP VM doesn't seem to be happy with virtual floppy disks anymore for whatever reason (the Floppy driver is present in Config.app and floppy control attached to the machine). No idea why my VM can't see virtual floppies anymore.
I also tried using vmount 0.6 (available from various open source NeXT software archives) inside my OPENSTEP VM to see if it could mount the disk images. But it doesn't seem to recognize any valid filesystem in the images.
I also tried using disktype and even testdisk to see if they could recognize the file system on these 2.88mb diskimages, but no dice.
So: I am wondering if anyone here can tell me if these 2.88mb disk images actually are valid disk images. I don't have any idea how to verify except to actually dump them onto real 2.88mb disks using a 68k slab ... but I haven't had a 68k slab for nearly 10 years. (One is, conveniently, scheduled to arrive at my door today. I'm hoping it works well enough as-is because I'm not a good recapper.) But now I'll need some 4mb/2.88mb floppy disks. $15ea... yikes.
Thanks!
Quote from: rockriver on February 28, 2021, 12:56:43 PMI don't have any idea how to verify except to actually dump them onto real 2.88mb disks using a 68k slab
Though I do wonder if the floppy images would mount if I dumped them to a SCSI disk or RAM disk.
Whatever particular flavor of UFS they are -- they seem to have a signature which includes "fdmach" and "demimonde" (!) -- may mean their disklabel & signature (or even C/H/S layout) is too peculiar for them to simply dd and then mount as a SCSI disk... at least, not without some heavy lifting...?
You could set up Previous and try to mount them there. The fact that the disklabel contains "fdmach" might indicate that they have a kernel on them and are bootable on 68k NeXT machines.
You can find binaries of Previous here (
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/Previous68Kemulator/) or build it from the source which can be found here (
http://previous.sourceforge.net). If building best use the latest revision of branch_softfloat.
Thanks Andreas!
I was able to make them work with Previous. I did have to strip 46 bytes off the beginning of the files, though. Perhaps some kind of header?
I accomplished this with:
dd ibs=1 skip=46 obs=512 if=1.img of=1_skip_start.img
I'm glad I could help! Yes, it seems there is some kind of header or data garbage on this file. Without the extra 46 byte it has exactly 2880*1024 Byte. NeXT disk labels always start with either dlV3, dlV2 or NeXT.
Just as addition: the 2,88 MB images were created nativly on NeXT with DiskCopyII.app wich adds an header to the image (save buffer). You can simply write back the content to the/a 2,88MB floppy using this program.
For the 1,44 MB images i was going another way: because some floppys are relativly weak i have found out that the old vgacopy on MSDOS/PCs let set the reading of weak sectors until 99 times, you can also try different drive mechanics - so the chance to recover broken floppys are realy high. These images don't have that header. You can write them back using windiskimager f.e.
For reading (and writing) 1.44MB floppies - really, floppies from any drive that uses an old-style, 34-pin floppy connector - there's Greaseweazle, an inexpensive STM32-based floppy read/write board & software, all open source, with a lively community:
https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle