Re: [MiNT] usage of 'dd' under FreeMiNT?

[Markus Fröschle <markus@mubf.de>]

Unfortunately, MiNT has no notion of raw disk partition device files. This can be considered good and bad. Good: no chance to accidentally corrupt your disk using dd (=„disk destroyer“) if you don’t know what you are doing, bad: you can’t help yourself easily if you do.

Nevertheless, it should be possible to do what you want using Linux: use your preferred Atari partitioning tool determine the start sector of the partition you want to write. Then use dd on Linux (using „skip=„number of sectors before your start sector“ conv=notrunc) to overwrite that area of your disk. 

Depending on the type of dump you have, you might need to add conv=swab to swap bytes.

It should be possible to use Aranym to determine the start sector (ideally on an image copy of the whole disk if you have enough space), that will probably save you time and effort to (re)do the cabling.

Be sure to have a backup of your disk. dd is outright dangerous.

Another aproach would be to write a small program that writes the partition data using Rwabs() or DMAwrite().

You might look into HDDRIVER specs also. Although never tried myself, it should be able to write single partition images to a predefined place on a raw disk.

Am 16.12.2013 um 18:49 schrieb Stefan Niestegge <beetle@abbuc.de>:

> Hi,
> 
> is it possible to dd an image of a partition under FreeMiNT?
> 
> In this case i want to write an exisiting image of debian/m68k to my
> Falcons HD. This didn't work on the PC, due to the weird Falcon IDE
> port. It stores the data byteswapped on the drive, so Linux on the PC
> can't see a valid partition table.
> 
> The partition i want to write 'm68k-base.e2z' to is the fourth one i
> created with HD-Driver.
> 
> Linux kernel mounts this as /dev/hda4. Under MiNT i can access it as
> /f.
> 
> Greets,
> Stefan
>