[sdiy] Help reading Mirage Disks?

[Rainer Buchty]

> Has anybody been able to read Mirage disks on a PC?

Yes.

> I'm pretty sure it uses a 720K single sided 3.5" drive.
>
> Is this a standard drive? Can I take the drive from the Mirage and hook it to
> the Floppy disk ribbon cable in a PC?

The drive is not the problem, the PC (or better its OS) is. The disk 
format is not something like FAT, not even a dynamic disk format but a 
very static disk geometry.

Mirage disks can be easily dumped, their format is 80 tracks w/ 5 
sectors per track; sectors 1-4 are 1024 bytes each, sector 5 is 512 
bytes. Just ignore the second side (unless you're not dealing with 
2-side Mirage disks which were created with a two-headed drive and a 
switch...).

Can be dumped with your favorite dump tool, e.g. ANADISK (DOS/Windows) 
or fdutils (Linux). Once you got the dump, you can extract the data. The 
disk geometry is explained on
	http://www.webcom.com/jawknee/Mirage/UPWARD/os1docs.html#load

Rainer