Atari Megafile 30 Utilities

[NeXT]

I picked up a Megafile 30 a while ago that had the Atari Hard Disk Utilities floppy taped to the inside but the unit had no hard drive.
I recently dropped a Miniscribe 8438 (30mb RLL) drive in it and plugged the kit into my 1040ST and went to format it for use with the system.
Unfortunately TOS reports that there is nothing on the floppy.
Anyone know where I can source the utilities again and how exactly would I be able to write it back to a disk?

 

[g4ugm]

You can get the HDX Utilities from here:-

http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Diskutils/

but if you want a supported driver you might want to buy a copy of this:-

http://www.seimet.de/atari/en/hddriver.html

Hope this helps

Dave

http://www.seimet.de/atari/en/hddriver.html

 

[NeXT]

Slightly confused now on what you are saying and telling me to do here. :s

 

[g4ugm]

the original atari hdx utilities are at UMICH and they should work fine with the megafile. I would try those first.

 

[NeXT]

Ah, I see. Thanks.
As for Hddriver, I assume that means there is no easy way to write atari floppies from a PC, right?

 

[dorkbert]

I think Atari and DOS shares the same format on 720k floppies.

 

[Chuck(G)]

720K floppies formatted/prepared on a PC will work just fine on an ST and also be readable on the PC. Floppies formatted on an ST (particularly early ones) will need the boot sector rewritten to be understood by a PC. There are utilities around to do this.

 

[g4ugm]

Chuck,

Many early ST's had only single sided , aka 360K drives that won't read PC formated flopies. You can format them of the ST but getting the utilities acress to add the sector byte could be interesting. You could add an external floppy Atari's are also pretty low powered on the floppy bus but will work with most modern 720k drives with CMOS driver chips.

So yes getting data across could be interesting.

Not sure if any of the emulators will talk to physical floppies as that might get round the problem....

 

[Chuck(G)]

Many early ST's had only single sided , aka 360K drives that won't read PC formated flopies. You can format them of the ST but getting the utilities acress to add the sector byte could be interesting. You could add an external floppy Atari's are also pretty low powered on the floppy bus but will work with most modern 720k drives with CMOS driver chips.

As a one-time "official" developer for the ST, I do know that. But it's a simple matter to write a new boot sector even on a single-sided floppy that DOS will understand. I'm fairly certain that it could be done on the ST. Somewhere I think I've still got a DOS device driver that handles the single-sided 720K with no boot rewrite needed.

 

[vwestlife]

720K floppies formatted/prepared on a PC will work just fine on an ST and also be readable on the PC. Floppies formatted on an ST (particularly early ones) will need the boot sector rewritten to be understood by a PC. There are utilities around to do this.

The MS-DOS 6.x/Windows 95+ "Scandisk" utility is capable of doing this. I discovered when I first got my 520ST that disks formatted on a PC worked fine on both systems, but disks formatted on the Atari were not readable on the PC until I ran Scandisk and let it fix the boot sector.

 

[g4ugm]

Thats usefull, never realized that....