Extracting documents from IBM 6580 Displaywriter Disks

[bolex]

An acquaintance of mine gave me a few 8" Displaywriter disks that had his Grandfathers' journal on them and asked me to extract the data from them. The story is that his grandfather dictated his journal on tape and his secretary typed it up on their flashy new Displaywriter in 1981. The family had the audio tapes for a while, but the tapes were eventually lost, leaving only the floppy disks. I was able to image both disks using ImageDisk and also used IMDV to dump the EBCDIC contents to a text file. This at least assured us that the data was there and it looks like it is complete. Of course, the EBCDIC dump of the disk is out of order. Finding the right order of each paragraph would be a pretty big puzzle. It would not be entirely impossible, but pretty time consuming.

I'd love to find a tool that can extract the files from the disk images (in order), or give me logical access to the floppy disk. Does anyone know of any tools out there that can do this?

The only other tools that I'm aware of are the conversion tools that are specific with the Flagstaff Engineering floppy controllers. I have a few of these, but I've never been able to get those floppy controllers to work and it appears the software will only work with the the floppy controllers. I'm sure there are more tools available, but google is not helping. Any assistance would be appreciated.

 

[bolex]

I found this Transformenator on sourceforge that might do this. I'll give it a try tomorrow.

 

[GeoffB17]

Hm - I was interested in this as I have a d/w drive unit, and some manuals, but nothing that I can do anything with.

I was wondering what you meant about data being out of order, and was thinking maybe something like sector interleave, but when I checked I found hints that the d/w maybe uses a sort of virtual file system, so nothing like CP/M or DOS? This would explain your problem.

I assume that the disk is in fact a single file of blocks of data, and there is no easy way of telling which blocks (sectors ?) relate to which file/document, and in which order? I assume though there must be an index somewhere, maybe that is also a document that could be mixed up with everything else? Are the blocks in chains, i.e. each block is linked to next/prev blocks in the same chain?

I've also used IMDV to create a raw image of a disk, then written BASIC progs to manipulate the blocks to unscramble sector interleave, but that's with a scenario where each track would use the same interleave - what you're looking at could be something totally different?

I need to look again at the docs I've got, but I remember it saying about sector size, I don't think it said much (anything?) about files/documants.

I'll keep an eye on this.

Geoff

 

[Chuck(G)]

David Schmidt has done this, as have I. The filesystem structure is unusual, but not shockingly so. Of course, the text is in EBCDIC, if that wasn't obvious. There are some differences between the single- and double-sided media versions.

 

[bolex]

That Transformentor program worked like a charm. Big thank you to David Schmidt for offering that up on sourceforge.

Tranformentor says it extracts from disk image. I assumed this was binary, so I converted the IMD file to binary using IMDU. I'm not sure if this step was necessary, but it worked.

The file created by Transformentor is in the IBM DCA format. I used the old Wordperfect 5.1 convert.exe to convert the file to a WordPerfect 5.1 file, and then used a modern version to convert to RTF. The final output looked really good.