Accessing partitions in drive images

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Tue Jan 31 09:19:27 EST 2012


On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> On 01/30/2012 05:08 PM, Bill Freeman wrote:
> > On 1/30/12, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:02 AM, OK? Im Deluxe!
> >> <mwl+gnhlug at alumni.unh.edu> wrote:
> >>>> What about `flopticals', LS-120s, etc.?
> >>>> Were they partitioned like HDDs?
> >>> Typically, no.  Neither were any of the various tape devices that
> >>> used the PC floppy drive controller interface.
> >>   Well, now, the hang-a-tape-drive-off-the-floppy-controller thing was
> >> something else entirely.  As far as I know, there was never any
> >> standard PC/BIOS/DOS/whatever interface for tape drives, so if someone
> >> made one of those they had to invent their own thing.
> >>
> >>   But I find it interesting that the "super floppies" behaved like
> >> floppies.  My understanding is (was) that the PC had a rather narrow
> >> idea of what a floppy disk could be (360, 1.2, 720, 1.44, 2.88, maybe
> >> a few more).  How did that work?
> > There are at least four different meanings of "floppy" in use here:
> >
>
>

> Floppy disks predated the PC. There were many different types, sizes
> and formats. There were even floppies that had hard formatting (eg holes).
> The other difference between floppy devices and hard drives was the side
> of the FAT table. Floppies used a 12 or 16 bit FAT table. But, the
> original IBM PC was a floppy-only product.
>
>
>
FWIW, Solaris, SunOS do have an idea of partitions on floppies, but it
isn't used.  I think Ultrix and OSF/1 (later Digital Unix, Tru64) did too.

I don't think my Apple ][ floppies were ever partitioned, but I had flippys
:-/
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