ADFS E Format Disk (from SCP) not recognised by Arculator or Mame

[GlennPegden]

On Friday my GreaseWeazel arrived, so I pulled out my stash of floppies from the A3000 and let rip.

Using default gw options to generate and SCP and then hxcfe to create a raw sector by sector dump, I end up with an image that Gerald Holdsworth's Disk Image Manager rightly recognises as ADFS E format disk. This is great as it's allowed me to recover some long lost source code.

However, my understanding is that this sector by sector raw dump is exactly what both Arculator and Mame use, except RiscOS under either emulators doesn't recognise the disk as valid ("Disc not understood"). RO3 disk tools like !QFR and Investigator II show me the data on the disk is present, it's just not recognised as a valid format. Interestingly John Kortink's !DiskInfo thinks is has an old map (which it obviously isn't).

The problem is almost certainly user error on may part and I suspect that gw ripping 82 tracks worth of data (because it can) may be coming into play (but I can't work out how to *not* rip the last 2 tracks).

Does anyone have any help or suggestions? Or am I going to have to dig deep into ADFS E and the new map format and work out what the OS doesn't like?

BTW I don't have a working "real" Arc with a GoTek, so I've no idea if the images work on a real Arc, I only have the emulators to test against.

[Pernod]

However, my understanding is that this sector by sector raw dump is exactly what both Arculator and Mame use, except RiscOS under either emulators doesn't recognise the disk as valid ("Disc not understood").

Can you attach an example?

[cmorley]

The emulator might expect an interleved file format.. so Side 0 Track 0, S1 T0, S0 T1, S1 T1 etc...

[geraldholdsworth]

There are some factors which RISC OS takes into account that Disc Image Manager doesn't. Like, for example, directories need to be on a sector boundary (result: Broken Directory) and new map fragments also need to start and end on sector boundaries (result: Disc not recognised).

As Pernod said, if you could post an example, we could look into it.

[GlennPegden]

I suspect interleaving is going to be the issue. Looking at the data is doesn't look interleaved and it seems to be an intentional decision of HxC not to allow interleaving of raw images.

I'm now digging to see if there is tooling or a method to convert an scp into a format mame/arculator likes.

That said, here's a couple of dumps of a random disk (one using hcxfe the other keirf's disk-analyse) in case I'm wrong.

[cmorley]

Your tmp image works in arculator. Rename as .adf and open an ADFS disc.

[GlennPegden]

Interesting! I haven't tried mame yet, but I have it working in arculator now!

I've no idea what I did differently. I confirmed the images didn't work renamed as .adf . Closed down the arculator session I had, created a new machine config and boom, it worked. So I went back to my original config and suddenly that worked too!

Thanks for the pointers.

Now to work my way through my stack of floppies!