Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!eci386!jmm
From: jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: Mtools for my Sparcstation
Message-ID: <1990Dec10.204940.13564@eci386.uucp>
Date: 10 Dec 90 20:49:40 GMT
References: <3328@lectroid.sw.stratus.com> <4007@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: jmm@eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
Lines: 23

In article <4007@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> philr@knecht.Eng.Sun.COM (Phil Robar) writes:
|lever@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@eci386