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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Software News => Topic started by: adolescent on December 27, 2006, 06:34:40 PM
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Adfread will allow you to create ADF floppy disk images from regular Amiga disks using standard PC hardware. It uses same method as Disk2FDI but is compatible with Windows 2000 and newer.
Release notes:
adfread 1.1 (24.12.2006)
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Adfread will allow you to create ADF floppy disk images from regular
Amiga disks using standard PC hardware. It uses same method as Disk2FDI
but is compatible with Windows 2000 and newer.
Requirements:
- Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista
- PC mainboard must have hardware support for 2 floppy drives
Unfortunately most modern PC mainboards don't have B: drive motor
and select signals connected. MB is compatible if you can configure
both A: and B: drives in BIOS. (usually..)
- 2 non-USB floppy drives installed on the same cable
- Regular format Amiga disks without any copy-protection
- A normal PC-formatted 1.44M floppy
Changes from 1.0 to 1.1:
- Improved internal disk operations
- Adfread can be run multiple times and only damaged sectors are
retried (uses .status file to store sector status
information)
- Small fixes and updates
Download it at www.winuae.net (http://www.winuae.net).
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so this means a catweasel is no longer needed?
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Wow! Does it work with non-DOS disks?
--
moto
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@ motorollin
try rereading the original post more carefully:
QUOTE:
- Regular format Amiga disks without any copy-protection
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>so this means a catweasel is no longer needed?
Disk2FDI didn't need a catweasel either: both programs (ab)use the PC's floppy controller to read Amiga disks by swapping between two drives while reading. Disk2FDI only ever worked under DOS/Win9x however, so those with newer NT-based Windowses had to go through the annoyances of dual booting or using a startup disk.
Of course, the catweasel does lots of other things as well and probably works a bit neater (without the additional floppy drive needed). What would be great now would be a Catweasel for USB that you could use on laptops without PCI slots or an additional floppy drive.
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Catweasel can write amiga (and other format) disks, Disk2FDI/adfread are read only.
Anyway, Disk2FDI method is years old, nothing new here.
Cloanto: Reading Amiga Floppy Disks on PC (http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/3-118.html)
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Though I have a Catweasel, I still think it's quite an impressive feat to get stock PC hardware to read disk formats it wasn't designed to access... And a good native Windows 2K/XP version will no doubt increase its appeal...
- Ali
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the reason i asked is because the catweasel is a little over $100... for my use I would just want to read Amiga disks so I can xfer it to my linux box to use with E-UAE..dont really need to write to a Amiga floppy. I didnt know about the disk2fdi thing.. neat stuff..saves me $100
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What would be great now would be a Catweasel for USB that you could use on laptops without PCI slots or an additional floppy drive.
very true. I would love to get data off of my amiga floppies.
and I can't do that from my laptop at the moment.
I'm not sure why Adfread needs TWO floppy drives. Realize I am not a programmer so please don't roll those eyes at me. :-D
I'm glad people are taking the trouble to write these programs for us. thanks
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I'm not sure why Adfread needs TWO floppy drives
A full explanation can be found on the Disk2FDI web site (http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/trial.html). Grab the trial version's ZIP file and take a look at the included "RAWFLOPY.DOC" file.
- Ali
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TheMagicM:
As I've posted about before (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25895), I have a couple hundred disks I'm trying to dump. I made a pass over them with adfread (a lot of the features in version 1.1 are a result of me pestering Toni :-) ), then I made another pass over them with the Catweasel MK4.
I wasn't able to dump a significantly larger number of disks with the Catweasel, however, the process was significantly faster than it was with adfread.
So far I've dumped about 63% of them. Some disks required quite a few retries before I got a successful dump. A few required some hex editing tricks to get them just right. The floppies were not stored securely for many years: they came from someone's garage and smelled of gas and oil. I'm hopeful that once Jens releases software with some of the promised data recovery features I'll be able to retrieve even more.
For the record, I also verified the OFS floppies (the majority of the disks) by using unadf (http://lclevy.club.fr/adflib/unadf.html). If unadf didn't produce any warnings or errors about the filesystem structure, data blocks, etc., then I took it to mean that the dump was good. OFS floppies store checksums in each 512 byte sector, whereas FFS does not, so this type of check isn't possible with the few FFS disks.