cwfloppy is a Linux device driver for the
Catweasel Advanced Floppy Controller manufactured by
Individual Computers.
The Catweasel is a versatile Shugart bus controller, i.e., it can
control floppy drives. It is extremely flexible and can be
programmed to read and write just about any floppy disk in the
world.
This driver supports all controller versions, ISA (MK1) and PCI (MK3 and MK4). The Amiga versions of the controller are currently not supported, but it should be easy to adapt the driver for Linux/m68k (so far nobody has expressed an interest in this, though). Also, only the floppy is controlled by this driver. If you want to make use of the additional SID and joystick features present on the PCI cards, you must use the driver from Dirk Jagdmann and Michael Stickel.
As of yet, this driver supports the following formats (rw = read/write, ro = read-only):
Note: this driver exports a block device to user space, similar to /dev/fd0. If you don't need to access your floppy through a block device, e.g. you merely want to read and write complete disk images, then consider using Karsten Scheibler's driver. It supports more floppy formats and kernel versions than my driver, which hasn't been updated for a while.
| cwfloppy-0.5.4 (82K, 27-Jun-2009) |
Linux 2.6 (Kernel >=
2.6.28) only; read only; all Catweasels (MK1 up to MK4)
supported |
| cwfloppy-0.5.3 (82K, 15-Jun-2008) |
Linux 2.6 (Kernels 2.6.20 up
to 2.6.27) only; read only; all Catweasels (MK1 up to MK4)
supported |
| cwfloppy-0.5.2 (83K, 7-May-2005) |
Linux 2.6 (Kernel <
2.6.20) only; read only; all Catweasels (MK1 up to MK4)
supported |
| cwfloppy-0.3.3 (81K, 8-Dec-2005) |
Linux 2.4 only;
read&write; all Catweasels (MK1 up to MK4)
supported |
|
cwfloppy-0.3.1 (38K, 18-Aug-2002) |
Linux 2.0 to 2.4;
read&write, only ISA Catweasels |
As you can see, there's currently no write support for you
if you have kernel
2.6.
News (27-Jun-2009):
Released cwfloppy-0.5.4, which
works with Linux kernels >= 2.6.28 and on AMD64 systems (thanks
to Bernd Wachter).
News (15-Jun-2008):
Released cwfloppy-0.5.3,
which works with Linux kernels >= 2.6.20.
News (08-Dec-2005):
Released cwfloppy-0.3.3,
which is now the latest driver for all Catweasels under Linux
2.4.
News (07-May-2005):
Released cwfloppy-0.5.2,
which fixes a problem where an MK4 Catweasel is not detected
properly. Also, added cwfloppy-0.3.3-pre1 (untested,
though), which adds MK4 support to the Linux 2.4 driver.
News (06-Mar-2005):
Released cwfloppy-0.5.1,
which adds support for the new Catweasel MK4.
News (31-Aug-2004): Released cwfloppy-0.5.0c, which fixes a problem with a kernel panic which was occurring quite often on some systems. Should be able to read disks in all four formats on uni- and multi-processor systems without trouble now.
News (22-Aug-2004): Released cwfloppy-0.5.0. v0.5.0 is highly experimental. It's the first version running under Linux 2.6 (and only under Linux 2.6 -- if you still run 2.4 or even older, don't bother upgrading). Only the PCI Catweasel has been tested. Write support is still missing, disk changes might not be detected properly, formatting doesn't work. Be prepared for anything. I hacked the final bits and pieces together only today, and I really wanted to get this out of the door, but let me repeat that this release is still not in the least fit for production use (whatever that means in a retro-computing context). But I found that simply reading disks works quite fine so far :-) All the other features will eventually be added, of course. Any feedback is appreciated.
The small hole in the upper left corner DOES make a difference: an HD floppy drive physically reads and writes an HD disk (with such a hole) in a manner different from a DD disk (without such a hole). A floppy drive does not and can not write an HD disk in HD format with the same physical parameters as a DD disk in DD format!
If you always use HD disks with HD format and DD disks with DD format, everything's fine. However, at some time in the nineties, the floppy disk industry stopped selling DD disks. Because many Amiga users still relied on the DD format (only the Amiga 4000 has an HD drive), they simply took HD disks and used them in their DD drives. Some users covered the HD indicator hole with a piece of tape, some didn't. Because their drives were only DD drives, the drives didn't care - so it really didn't make a difference either! Most HD disks seem to work fine this way, even though they have been constructed for HD formatting. In fact, I've never come across an HD disk that could NOT be used in an Amiga DD drive. There have been people claiming otherwise, though.
However, if you insert an HD disk formatted in DD format into an HD drive, you HAVE to take care to cover the HD indicator hole! If you do not do this, the drive will think it is an HD formatted disk and adjust its physical parameters accordingly, leading to READ and/or WRITE ERRORS on a basically fine disk! Unfortunately, this can not be worked around in software.
So, if somebody gives you a disk with an HD hole and you can not mount it as either Amiga HD or MS-DOS HD, it could be a perfectly fine DD formatted disk -- only your drive is in the wrong mode to read it without errors, because it detects the uncovered HD hole and thinks it is in HD format. Cover the hole with some piece of tape, and everything will be fine.
For the interested, the README in the cwfloppy archive contains instructions on how to illustrate this effect using track histograms.