TURN A COMMODORE 5.25-INCH FLOPPY INTO A READABLE DISK IMAGE

1 Hook up the disk drive

Your Commodore 1541-series disk drive should be connected to its PSU, which should be receiving power. The serial cable should be connected to the serial port on the disk drive, and to the XUM1541 (or variant) interface/adaptor. This is turn should be connected to your PC’s USB port.

2 Power on and detect

After installing the OpenCBM software and XUM1541 driver on your Linux PC (see main article), power on the disk drive. Detect the device is receiving data by opening a terminal and resetting with cbmctrl reset . Next, check the status of the drive with cbmctrl status 8 (correct output in image).

3 Prepare the disk image

You are now ready to create your first disk image. The simplest way to do this is by using the d64copy tool, although others (cbmcopy and imgcopy) are also included within the OpenCBM software. While they are used in a similar way, you should use -h or --help if you want to see the full list of commandspecific options.

4 Create a disk image

Standard Commodore 64 floppy disks can be read and a disk image created on Linux. Simply input a command in the format d64copy 8 image.d64 . Although the default command works in most cases, various options can be checked with d64copy -h . Remember to change image.d64 to your preferred filename each time.

5 Launch the D64 image in VICE

Confirm the disk image is working by launching it in the Commodore 64 emulator VICE. The easiest way to do this is to attach the disk image. Go to File > Attach Disk Image > Drive #8 (or #9 if preferred) to browse the disk contents, then use Attach/ Load to run it.

6 Create an index

Keep a record of what is in each disk file. This could be done with a pen and paper, text editor, a database file or a spreadsheet. Giving each disk image a unique, relevant name will help in this process, and the contents of each image file should be listed alongside the name.