Catweasel success stories?

[CdreCommodore]

I have a collection of 200 floppy disks from the local Amiga user group that existed in the 1980s-90s that I would like to dump and preserve.

I've been using adfread, and I've dumped about half of them.  Of course, since it's basically a hack, it took quite a long time, required many redumps and re-reading of some sectors hundreds or thousands of times, and the resulting images had to be tested with unadf.  (By the way:  thanks to Toni Wilen for making some very helpful modifications to adfread that will appear in the next public version.  :-)

The remaining half are being very stubborn and I can't get good reads off of them.  Which brings me to my question:

Can anyone tell me about any success they've had using the Catweasel to dump floppies?  How does it compare to using a real Amiga with a real double density floppy drive, or with using disk2fdi/adfread?

If I spend money on the Catweasel and I can't get any more disks to dump, it's going to be kind of a waste.  :-)  But if it worked very well, it would be much easier then tracking down a real Amiga to dump the disks with.

[redrumloa]

Dunno, I've never tried to use my Catweasel in this fashion. Wild guess, but have you read up on project Arjuna? CAPS? I don't know all too much about either so it's a wild guess. I have used Catweasel with UAE to read and write Amiga disks, but only in a traditional manner. I mainly use my Mk4 to write D64s for the 128D, which it does in about 6 seconds flat.

[CdreCommodore]

redrumloa wrote:
Dunno, I've never tried to use my Catweasel in this fashion. ... I have used Catweasel with UAE to read and write Amiga disks, but only in a traditional manner.

I think I may not have been clear, because I'm not sure what you mean by "this fashion", and I think "in a traditional manner" is what I mean.

I'm currently using standard PC hardware and adfread to try to dump these disks and I'm getting mixed results.  I'm thinking of either tracking down a real Amiga or getting a Catweasel.  

I'm curious to know if anyone else here has dumped a significant number of floppies using the Catweasel, and how good the results were.  It would be most interesting if someone's dumped disks with both a real Amiga and a Catweasel and checked to see if they got byte-identical results.

Edit:  Also, does the Catweasel report when it experiences some failure, e.g. an unreadable or corrupt sector?

[amigadave]

Troy,

I have three catweasle's and think they are well worth the price paid.  One in an A4000Tower, one in my son's AMD64 3000+ which we built together and the other waiting for a spare slot in my new Dell XPS Core2Duo.

[Trev]

I haven't done any mass reads or writes, but both the Catweasel Mk3 and Mk4 work wonderfully for me when I need to do ad hoc imaging.

The Catweasel is just a piece of hardware, however, so you'll need to tie it to a good piece of software. The card comes with a very basic imaging program. Jens is/was closely involved with the Arjuna project, so that might be a good place to start as well. In any case, yes, errors are reported to and handled by the software. Speaking of Jens, he's always helpful. If you have specific Catweasel questions, try emailing him directly via .

The SPS/CAPS people don't support the Catweasel (see ). If you have a real Amiga, you may have some luck getting the SPS folks to produce IPF image files for you, but I gather they're only interested in getting their hands on commercial software. See their site, , for more info.

[InTheSand]

Hi,

As Trev says, the imaging software provided with the Catweasel is basic, but functional. I've dumped loads of floppies with it and not had any show-stoppers.

One PITA that I've experienced (but not all users seem to) is that when asked to read or write a disk, the software starts before the disk has had a chance to be spun up. If the disk has just been inserted without being rotated by the drive, this can cause problems as the software is blindly reading/writing while the lug on the drive mechanism is trying to make contact with the corresponding hole on the metal hub of the disk. Remedy is to start the read/write operation, stop it, then re-start it.

Use of the Catweasel within WinUAE could also do with some improvement. It'd be nice if the Catweasel drive could replace the emulated DF0:, rather than appearing as a separate CAT: device.

 - Ali

[motorollin]

TroyDavis wrote:
I would like to dump and preserve.

Scatology?

Sorry, toilet humour is very much my thing.

--
moto

[Schoenfeld]

InTheSand:
The start-cancel-start again-trick is not necessary any more with the drivers that have been published more than three months ago. Please update your drivers if you still have to do that. Also read the readme files of the updated archives, because you might run into typical Windows-problems where the PnP manager pretends to have updated the drivers, but in reality left the old files in place.

Everyone:
The Catweasel can already read more bad/weak/damaged disks than a real Amiga can. We currently have two more things for data recovery in the works:

Automatic correction of streams if bits are found "off-center" - this will be a completely automatic process that will run in the background whenever checksums are not correct. Re-interpretation of the data will take place before a physical re-try is started. The routine already gave very good results on 25-year old 8" disks, and we're trying to tweak it in a way that no manual values have to be entered. The algorithm is very promising, as one of our 8" disks appeared unformatted to the original machine. The Catweasel can read the data off the disk, which has CRC16 checksums (almost impossible to go wrong with that).

The second thing is a method of judging if a signal comes from a mis-aligned drive. We're still working out the mathematics behind that, so all you need to have is enough courage to loosen the adjustment screws of your disk drive. This will let you adjust a drive for a specific disk (or set of disks) that has (have) been written with a mis-aligned drive. Again, this is very promising, as we found that almost all drives that you can buy new today are mis-aligned.

The imagetool does not have batch-backup features yet. We've focussed on the real bugs in the past, but we're now at a stage where we can think of new features like the above.

Jens Schönfeld

[CdreCommodore]

Thanks for all the responses (especially to Jens, who probably remembers me emailing him several times already. :-) )  I just ordered the MK4 from amigakit.com.  These are standard AmigaDOS disks, so I'm not looking to dump IPFs or anything else other than plain ADF.

[amigakit]

@TroyDavis

Thanks for the order!

[_ThEcRoW]

Jens are you referring to the cwmk42100 labelled file on your page, or another file. Because you have said months ago, so is possible that i had missed any previous release?.
Thanks!!!

[Dr_Righteous]

@ Amigakit

Dude, you have got to be the most pro-active retailer in the world! LOL!

[LoadWB]

In regards to mis-aligned drives, I use a program on the Commodore side of the world to align 1571 and 1541 drives -- it detects full- and half-track alignment problems which you compensate for by adjusting the head stepper motor.  Is there a good program for native Amiga hardware recommended for this purpose?

[Schoenfeld]

ThEcRoW:
I'm referring to the version published on august 24th, 2006. The file with version 2.0.0.0 is still there, but I have replaced the link with the file name for version 2.1.0.0. Yes, you might have missed an update :-)

Jens Schönfeld

[Schoenfeld]

LoadWB:

The 1541 and 1571 drives have limited access to the raw data that comes through the PLL. It's enough to make a good guess about the head alignment, but that's all you have: An "educated guess", but not the true information. Please double-check if you're really doing head alignment, or just motor speed adjustment.

The Catweasel moves more signal processing into the software, giving more raw information to the computer, so the computer can calculate a "quality of signal" that you can use to judge if you're moving in the right direction with your adjustment.

The Amiga on the other hand has no access to the raw information at all. Writing some software that allows you to adjust your drives is impossible. I do remember a program that lets you adjust the motor speed of the old NEC1036 drives (on some very early FredFish disk!).

Jens Schönfeld