Mount DSK image from hard drive?

+OLD CS1 · July 18, 2013

If there is another topic which covers this, I was not able to find it. I was thinking tonight about how I can mount ADF, ISO, and other disk images on my Amiga. I was thinking about how I now have a 120MB hard drive on my 99/4A system, and how I would love to be able to mount a DSK image, even if just for reading. Does a utility to do so exist? Hypothetically, would such capability be possible?

Opry99er · July 18, 2013

Unless I am gravely mistaken, the DOAD "DSK IMAGE" format is emulated only. It essentially "wraps" your TI readable FIAD (TIFILES) files into a virtual disk which is unreadable in that current format... Now, from what I understand, CF2K has an ability, using the CF7/nanoPEB, to "extract" the DOAD files back to FIAD and allows them to be stored onto regular disk or HD or whatever...

Of course mzapf's Image tool and TI99Dir do this as well, but strictly on the PC side .. In that way, as I am sure you know, you can load the extracted files onto whatever medium you choose.... But as far as I know, DSK images are not loadable at this time.

RobertLM78 · July 18, 2013

I can't seem to find any of the relevant threads where disk images were discussed. I seem to remember Tursi saying something about it.... anyway, although I'm not that savvy, it seems like it should be possible, even if, as Owen suggests, they aren't mountable now.

How much do .dsk images and Archive files differ? (Besides the fact that one's a PC file and other is a TI file How do they compare structurally? Are Archiver files like modern compressed files such as .zip or .tar files in that they are essentially compressed directories? (At least that's what I seem to remember reading somewhere ).

Edited July 18, 2013 by RobertLM78

+mizapf · July 18, 2013

DSK files are disk images, i.e. their contents, sector by sector. I call this a sector dump image (aka v9t9 format), opposed to a track dump image as used in PC99. They allow for all operations that you know from the real media handling. They have a constant size because they always contain all sectors / tracks.

Archive files also contain files, but they are limited compared to a disk image. They consist first of a list of file headers, just like the ones from TIFILES format but shorter, then starting from the next sector, all sectors of the first file, of the second, the third etc. So if you want to find a file in an archive you have to skip over the earlier files. This also means that you cannot change files in an archive if this changes its sector count. Archive files can be compressed using LZW compression. Unfortunately, you cannot pack directories into an archive, but you can certainly store archives in an archive.

I had to learn all that stuff to include it in TIImageTool. As I wanted to create an illusion of a directory in which you can put files, rename them, delete, or create new ones, it always recreates the archive on the fly when you change something (even recursively, could not resist :-) ).