With HDDRIVER you exchange data between your Atari and a PC or Mac without any additional software or cable connections. With HDDRUTIL you can create several TOS/Windows compatible FAT16 or FAT32 partitions per medium. Memory cards are ideal media for this purpose, but regular drives can also be used. Data transfers between your Atari and other platforms have never been this easy!
The screenshot shows files included in the HDDRIVER distribution on a Windows PC. The medium is a memory card with 4 TOS/Windows compatible partitions created with HDDRUTIL on the Atari. Windows versions older than Windows 10 on removable media only support one partition and ignore the others.
With a non-removable medium (hard disk) any version of Windows supports several partitions per drive, like in this case two TOS/Windows compatible FAT32 partitions E: and F: of about 70 GiB each. In order to use FAT32 partitions with the Atari MagiC or MiNT are required.
A TOS/Windows compatible memory card with 4 partitions on a Mac. Like with TOS and Windows all partitions are accessible.
Linux supports TOS compatible partitions with a maximum size of 256 MiB. Current Linux versions only offer a limited support for TOS/Windows compatible partitions in the Master Boot Record (MBR). Using more than one partition is only possible with GUID partition tables (see below).
With kernels supporting the Atari partition scheme the first TOS partition of an MBR can be mounted:
>mount /dev/sdc3 /mnt
When using kernels without support for the Atari compatible partition scheme the mtools are an alternative. In this case the first DOS partition of an MBR can be used, provided that mtools.conf is configured accordingly, e.g. with
drive c: file="/dev/sdc" partition=1
Current versions of HDDRIVER already handle the modern GUID partition tables (GPT), provided that they contain partitions within the 32 bit range. (TOS does not support 64 bit sector numbers.)
GUID types map to MBR types like this:
| GUID Type | Designation | MBR Type |
|---|---|---|
| EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 | Microsoft basic data | $0E (FAT16 LBA), $0C (FAT32 LBA) |
| 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 | Linux filesystem | $83 |
| 734E5AFE-F61A-11E6-BC64-92361F002671 | Atari TOS basic data | "BGM", "F32" |
Optionally HDDRIVER maps all other GUID types to the XHDI RAW type. There is more information on the GUID partition scheme in the HDDRIVER forum.
Future versions of HDDRUTIL will support the creation and restoring of GUID partition tables and booting HDDRIVER from these partitions. Until then TOS/Linux compatible media can be created under Linux as follows, expert knowledge provided:
- Launch fdisk for the respective raw device, e.g. /dev/sdX.
- Create a GUID partition table (command "g").
- Create one or more partitions (command "n").
- Set the partition types to "734E5AFE-F61A-11E6-BC64-92361F002671" (command "t").
- Write the modified data (command "w").
- Quit fdisk.
- Create TOS compatible filesytems with mkfs.vfat -A -s 2 -S <SECTOR SIZE> /dev/sdXN. The sector size depends on the partition size and is 512, 1024, 2048 or 4096. (Instead of mkfs.vfat you can also use "Edit Partitions" in HDDRUTIL.
The result is a TOS compatible medium with partitions that can be used by Linux and also by HDDRIVER.