Mtools for my Sparcstation

John Macdonald jmm at eci386.uucp
Tue Dec 11 07:49:40 AEST 1990


In article <4007 at exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> philr at knecht.Eng.Sun.COM (Phil Robar) writes:
|lever at vala.hw.stratus.com (Mark Lever) writes:
|
|>I am looking for something that will allow my sparcstation 3.5" drive to
|>read and write mac and PC diskettes.  Someone told me that MTOOLS could
|>do this.  Is this true and where can I find it?
|
|mtools supports DOS, not Mac disks.  SunOS 4.1.1 has this feature
|builtin.

Supporting Mac format has not been done often in the past.  For
the smaller formats (400K SS, 800K DS) the Mac uses variable speed
motor control to allow varying the number of sectors per track.
That is why PC's get 360K and 720K on the same disks.  Without
special hardware, this cannot be supported.

The newer high density drives from Apple use the same fixed
velocity layout as PC's, so you may see Mac layout support from
mtools or a similar program in the future (but they still won't
support the SS/DS formats).
-- 
Cure the common code...                      | John Macdonald
...Ban Basic      - Christine Linge          |   jmm at eci386



More information about the Alt.sources.d mailing list