Technical information

5.3 Working with Disk Images

A disk image is a file that contains an exact binary copy

of the raw content of the disk. Images are useful to

backup/restore SD card, to transfer information, and to

run with Atari emulators. There many tools available for

creating and reading disk images.

One nice tool for imaging/restoring SD card plugged

into a card reader is the USB-Image tool (currently in

version 1.68) that you can get from HERE. The card

reader containing the SD card should be displayed on

the left side. Select the drive you want and from there

you can use the backup and restore commands. The

backup command allows saving the content of the SD

card into an image file. While the restore command

takes an image file and write it to the SD card.

I do not use this USB-image tool very often because it does not recognize an SD card plugged into a

card reader when using the Hitachi Microfilter driver described above. This is due to the fact that when

using this driver the card is not seen any more as an USB stick but as a hard drive that this utility does

not handle.

Therefore my prefered tool for creating

and restoring images to be used on

Atari is the Drive Image program from

Peter Putnik. It works well with SD

card with or without the Hitachi driver.

Not only it allows creating and

restoring images of a drive, but it also

permits to look and modify the content

of the all the partitions inside the

image. For example it is possible to

add or extract files inside a partition. It

also allows dealing with TOS partitions

directly.

Two very nice utilities to deal with disk content are the WinHex editor and HxD freeware editor. As

their name indicates there main purpose is to edit the binary content of a raw disk or disk image. But

they are also capable to create and restore disk images of an SD card. And of course they offer many

more capabilities, for example I have used WinHex to look at the detail content of SD cards and/or

disk images of SD cards.

And last but not least are the capabilities of Atari emulators to deal with disk images:

 With Steem emulator it is possible to create and/or use Atari disk images by using the Pasti hard

disk low level emulation. Unfortunately the current Pasti limits the size of the disk images to 1GB.

You will also need a tool like WinHex to transfer the images to/from SD Cards.

 With Hatari emulator it is possible to use Atari disk images. I have tested quickly this capability that

seems to work well. And again you will need a tool like Drive Image to transfer the images to/from

an SD Cards.