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From: Tony Nicholson <tony.nicholson@computer.org>
Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm
Subject: Re: archiving floppy disks, natively on CP/M
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2024 08:07:15 +1100
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On 19/11/2024 3:23 am, Jeff Jonas wrote:

> Is there any CP/M equivalent to Unix/Linux "dd"
> or hex dump?

Back when I wanted to make images of my eight-inch floppies (in Dave 
Dunfield's Image Disk format - or .IMD files) I adapted the disk copy 
program for a Compupro/Godbout Disk-1 controller to produce a program 
called D2IMD.  It is able to read a disk image from one drive and write 
an .IMD disk image file to the other drive.  Usually the image fits due 
to detection of adjacent identical content sectors (e.g. those that 
contain 0xE5 bytes from formatting) which are stored a "Compressed" in 
the IMD file - but in the event that the IMD file fills the output disk, 
it closes the file and prompts for a second "continuation" volume.  When 
you transfer the multivolume files to your Linux/macOS system - just 
concatenate them to get a complete .IMD image file.  I've used these 
images successfully to boot floppy images under a suitably configured 
SIMH AltairZ80 simulator running on my Mac and Linux computers.

D2IMD is system specific and embeds a copy of the disk controller 
portion of the CP/M-Plus BIOS into the program.  If you have the sources 
to the CP/M-Plus BIOS for your single-board computer you should be able 
to adapt it to be used by D2IMD.  The source-code is up on GitHub in the 
d2imd folder at -


https://github.com/agn453/CPM-UG-Disks

Tony