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Hi!

I'm new to the SuperCard Pro, but I love it.  Jim, great work here.  I saw you at CommVEx last year, and just got one last week.

I'm wanting to take existing .imd files that are provided as disk images by someone else, and use the SuperCard Pro to write them to a fresh floppy.

Does the software allow a method to do this?

Here are the source .imd files.  http://bit.ly/1FJMQbr

I'm writing to Double-Density 5.25" floppies, formatted to 10 sectors per track.

Thanks!
-AJ
You might be able to use the HxC floppy drive emulator software to convert the .IMD file to .scp. SCP only handles .scp files, and Amiga .adf and C64 .g64 files. I have never seen the .imd format before. What creates it?
Thanks!

I actually don't know how these .imd files were created, as they were created by someone else and archived at bitsavers.org

So, I had to look it up myself, and Wiki seems to explain it fairly well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMG_(file_format)

I will try HxC software and look into it. Thanks!
-AJ
.imd is an Apple disk image? Your link doesn't show that.

.imd is an image of a Windows system hard drive or floppy disk from what I could find.

What type of disk are you expecting to be creating?
(06-29-2015, 12:54 PM)admin Wrote: [ -> ].imd is an Apple disk image?  Your link doesn't show that.

.imd is an image of a Windows system hard drive or floppy disk from what I could find.

What type of disk are you expecting to be creating?

Oh, yes, I see...I pasted the wrong link defining .imd files...my bad. Please disregard that.

I cannot speak to the machine that the person who created the images used, but the disks that were imaged are for the AT&T UNIX PC, from 1985.

They should be 5.25" double density (not high-density) disks, formatted to 10 sectors per track.

Does this help?
That is just standard IBM PC format. I don't know if HxC's software supports .imd files, but these would convert to .scp easily if it does.
Those files were created using Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk tool http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

It is a DOS based tool that can be used on any IBM PC compatible with a floppy controller. The above images should be writable on any PC compatible with a 5.25" 48TPI ("360K") drive attached.
Thanks for the info. It seems that those are just raw (decoded) sectors with a special header.
(06-30-2015, 07:17 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: [ -> ]Those files were created using Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk tool http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

It is a DOS based tool that can be used on any IBM PC compatible with a floppy controller. The above images should be writable on any PC compatible with a 5.25" 48TPI ("360K") drive attached.

Thanks, SomeGuy...your feedback here is VERY appreciated.  And Yes, I think I have also verified this to be the case.

So, it seems that, without some knowledgeable manipulation, the .imd files are not directly compatible with the SuperCard Pro...yet.  I have hope in Jim Drew that he can make his SuperCard Pro read & write ANYTHING!

(06-30-2015, 07:50 AM)admin Wrote: [ -> ]That is just standard IBM PC format. I don't know if HxC's software supports .imd files, but these would convert to .scp easily if it does.

I should also point out that I tried this route also. HxC software DOES say it supports .imd files. However, I did try a conversion from .imd to .scp, and for me, anyway, HxC's process was somewhat counter-intuitive. I couldn't find a "convert" choosing a single source file, so I could only find the "Batch converter" button, and that gave me a dialogue box where I chose SCP as the target file format, then I pointed the source directory where I had the .imd files stored, and specified a completely separate target directory. I did NOT check "Treat input files as RAW files".

So, after all that, HxC SAYS it converted them successfully, and produced corresponding .scp files, and then the SuperCard Pro would write them to a disk without errors, but alas, the UNIX PC did not recognize that disk as valid. If this route is an option, it is far from straightforward, so for the time being, I abandoned it....just for now though.

So, thinking that these .imd files really were created by David Dunfield's ImageDisk, I followed the instructions that Dave has on his page for this, downloaded the ImageDisk program, then I constructed a pure DOS machine (as recommended) from parts in my vintage computer lab, installed a fresh copy of stand-alone DOS 6.22 on it, and began running ImageDisk on it, worked through 5.25" floppy hardware config issues, jumpers, and on and on and on...all stuff I was hoping to avoid by having the SuperCard Pro.

Well, sure enough, ImageDisk recognizes these .imd files as valid .imd images. That's good...at least I have confirmation!

However, there are a HUGE number of options for which to WRITE to a disk with these .imd images as source files. I've gone through a myrad of iterations here, but it seems that with ImageDisk, you have to get all of the settings just right, to match your hardware, tracks, sides, kbps settings, and on and on.

So, it seems that, in this case, for me anyway, not being the one who created the .imd images, and not knowing what hardware settings or ImageDisk settings that the creator used when he/she created these .imd images, I am only guessing to either match it or find the right compliments to it.

So, after about 40-some combinations of trial and error, I'm growing weary of getting ImageDisk to work for this either.

So, I am really hoping that after rambling on about all of this in painful detail, that Admin, SomeGuy, Jim Drew, or other, can suggest good ways to just extract the necessary raw data out of these .imd files, put it in a .scp friendly format, and write it out.

For testing purposes, I should point out that I can get the SuperCard Pro to create .scp images from the working UNIX PC floppies that I actually have, and then the SuperCard Pro will also create a fresh new disk from that .scp image, that runs flawlessly in the UNIX PC. So, therefore, I can produce some .scp files that to comply with the UNIX PC's format, and maybe we can compare to how HxC converts them? Or, just what we need to extract from the .imd files to get them to match.

Anyway, those are just the final points that I think might be relevant here.

So, if you've read all of that, let me just say thank you! And, I am always very appreciative of what anyone here can offer from their own personal knowledge and experience.

Thanks again,
-AJ
http://MightyFrame.com
(07-02-2015, 01:07 AM)mightyframe Wrote: [ -> ]So, it seems that, without some knowledgeable manipulation, the .imd files are not directly compatible with the SuperCard Pro...yet. I have hope in Jim Drew that he can make his SuperCard Pro read & write ANYTHING!
ImageDisk is a very popular format. It can archive non-copy protected disks that were written using typical NEC/WD/Intel floppy microcontrollers. This includes support for different sectors per track, 128/256/512 and 1024 byte sectors, and both FM and MFM encoding when using a controller that supports both. It is regularly used for archiving many CP/M, Unix, and oddball MS-DOS formats. Although obviously it can't touch anything that uses GCR encoding, like the Apple II.

(07-02-2015, 01:07 AM)mightyframe Wrote: [ -> ]I should also point out that I tried this route also. HxC software DOES say it supports .imd files.
I had tried v2.0.26.0 myself not that long ago for something. Its user interface is horrible. Normally you just "load" and then "export" images, but I could never get it to create a usable SCP or KF image for me either. Part of the problem, I think, is that it has no way to specify the target drive type (300/360 RPM, 48/96TPI, etc).

(07-02-2015, 01:07 AM)mightyframe Wrote: [ -> ]However, there are a HUGE number of options for which to WRITE to a disk with these .imd images as source files. I've gone through a myrad of iterations here, but it seems that with ImageDisk, you have to get all of the settings just right, to match your hardware, tracks, sides, kbps settings, and on and on.
Normally the only thing you should need to specify is the Double Step option. On a 48TPI/360K drive this will always be "off". (It has no way to know if you REALLY want to write to just the first 40 tracks of 96TPI drive or every other track)

If the image was recorded using 300KBPS (such as a 360K disk in a 1.2mb drive) then would also need to set the data rate to 250KBPS.

The above images were written at 250KBPS. (You can use the imagdisk viewer to see this).

Are you using a "360K" drive to write these images? Please be aware that a 1.2MB/96TPI drive CAN NOT reliably write 360K/48TPI disks! They will almost never be readable in a proper 360K/48TPI drive.

That is the one tricky part about writing 5.25 disk media, and even the SuperCard pro can not overcome this physical drive limitation.

Personally, I always use 360K drives for reading/writing unless I run in to a disk that is clearly high or quad density.

I should point out that once you have a disk successfully written, I have no idea how you would access it in a UnixPC. Smile Normally on Unix you have to go through a pile of rigmarole to mount the file system, but in some cases unix disks don't have a file system and you are intended to concatinate the output of the raw device and run it through the TAPE archiver.
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