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 current versions of Windows there is no such restriction anymore.
With a hard drive all versions of Windows support multiple partitions per device, such as in this case 2 TOS/Windows compatible FAT32 partitions E: and F: of about 70 GiB each. To use FAT32 partitions with the Atari MagiC or MiNT are required.
A TOS/Windows compatible memory card with 4 partitions on a Mac. As with TOS and Windows, all partitions are usable.
Linux supports TOS compatible partitions with a maximum size of 256 MiB. Current Linux versions only offer limited support for TOS/Windows compatible partitions in the Master Boot Record (MBR). A GUID partitio table (see below) solves this problem.
With kernels that support 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 can already handle the modern GUID partition tables (GPT). A future update of HDDRUTIL will support creating and recovering GUID partition tables. HDDRIVER will also be able to boot 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 GPT partition schema that can be used by both Linux and HDDRIVER. In the future, HDDRUTIL will be able to create TOS/Windows-compatible GPT media that are particularly well suited for data exchange with other platforms.