**** Cyborg Central ****

If you are using an SD-based hard drive with your Atari ST, it is very easy to move files back and forth from Ubuntu using the mformat/mcopy/mdelete/etc series of commands. The magic option is -i; this allows you to specify an image to be used as a FAT disk, and is smart enough to understand the Atari ST disk format.

In my case, when I attached my SD card to my workstation, it appears as /dev/sdc, with four 256mb partitions. Mounting these is difficult if you are using a TOS 1.0 compatible disk format, which is the only thing my first-run Atari 1040 STF understands. It was easy to copy files, though:

$ sudo mcopy -s -i /dev/sdc1 * ::

The command must be used under sudo to write to the device. the :: represents the root of the FAT filesystem; if you want to copy files to a subdirectory, or copy from the Atari back to Ubuntu, just format your paths like this:

::/folder/file <-- is DISK:/FOLDER/FILE

Ubuntu makes it incredibly easy to sling ST files around, too. Want to extract the files from an image? Just do:

$ mcopy -s -i IMAGE.ST :: .

It will pull the files right out.

Categorized as: Atari | Linux | Ubuntu