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Rainbow 100 Hard-disk partition scheme?

S

shirsch

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Joined
Aug 17, 2008
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873
Location
Burlington, VT
I have a failing ST-412 in my Rainbow 100B and would rather not lose the files that came on it. Today I was able to read a sector data image from it using a Gesswein mfmemu. However I cannot figure out how to loop mount the partitions on a Linux system and get to the files. There's nothing I recognize as a PC/MS-DOS boot sector or partition map. Has anyone ever seen technical information on the partitioning and filesystem layout?

Tried kpartx, but it's not finding anything. And, after considerable digging, I'm not even finding documentation on initializing, partitioning and format of the internal drive. I don't see how it could be FDISK since the image has none of the expected magic numbers.
 
I'm in the same boat with my ST-506. The partition scheme for MS-DOS and CPM-86 is not anything I could understand.
 
I did tease out this information using WUTIL. Does anyone recognize the terminology for those defined segments? I have the Pascal sources for WUTIL, so in the worst case it can be reverse engineered out of that.

rainbow_hd.jpg
 
Ok, after a lot of reading and experimentation I'm able to mount the image and get to the files. Solution is to synthesize an MS-DOS boot sector patched with the appropriate parameters then append the data in the Rainbow DOS partition starting from the first FAT. At that point it "looks" like a standard MSDOS volume and can be mounted using loopback. I need to clean this up and code a small Python program to make it repeatable.
 
Looking for Rainbow owners who are able and willing to test my code. You will need a complete sector image of the hard drive such as would be created by David Gesswein's mfmemu device. Adding support for CP/M should not be difficult but I do not have it installed on my hard drive. If you are able to provide an image that includes multiple MS-DOS partitions and/or CP/M partitions I'd appreciate being able to get my hands on it. Please PM me either way.
 
Hi there! I stumbled across this thread while attempting to find information on (and understand) exactly how the Rainbow stores dos boot sector data on RX50 floppies (trying to find a cpmtools-style solution to working with dos RX50 images, i.e. to add and remove files from images directly without going through a physical drive). That said, I do (obviously) have a Rainbow I'm mucking about with. It contains David's mfmemu for use as a hard drive, formatted for a 40mb drive with one dos and one cpm partition. I would be happy to run any tests you'd like, though I don't know if its useful to you, as I'm running an emulator and not an original spindle drive.

Cheers! Alison
 
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