A set of tools for reading/writing image files for the Spare Time Gizmos SBC6120 single board computer
I needed a way to set up the CF card of my newly built SBC6120 single-board computer. Steve Gibson has an excellent set of SBC6120 Windows utilities but unfortunately they are incompatible with Windows 10+, and I couldn't get them to work properly in an XP virtual machine. Besides which, I'm a Linux guy, and I'd rather do as much as possible in Linux and not have to run VMs or boot to Windows. So I hacked up my own set of tools. :)
These tools should work on most Unix/Linux systems. The commands blockdev, stat, dd and pv are required.
Most Linux distributions should have these, if not installed by default, then somewhere in their package
repository. Unfortunately they do NOT work on OS X, as OS X is completely missing the blockdev command,
and its stat command uses a different syntax than the Linux variant.
You will most likely need to run these commands as the root user. Most Linux/Unix distros come with
the sudo command that makes this relatively easy. E.g. sudo ./from_sbc.sh /dev/sdc 0001 system_backup.img
Copies a partition from an SBC6120 format drive into an image file. partition must be specified in octal.
This is roughly equivalent to Steve's AtaToWin tool.
Example: from_sbc.sh /dev/sdc 0001 system_backup.img writes partition 0001 from the SBC6120 formatted
disk at /dev/sdc to a file named system_backup.img.
Writes an image file to a given partition of an SBC6120 format drive. partition must be specified in octal.
This is roughly equivalent to Steve's WinToAta tool.
Example: to_sbc.sh games.img /dev/sdc 0010 writes the contents of the file games.img onto partition 0010
of the SBC6120 formatted disk at /dev/sdc.
Unfortunately I do not have an equivalent to Steve's InstallOS8 utility. To initially set up your card, just
download the raw OS/8 system and (optionally) games partitions from Steve's page
and use to_sbc.sh to write them to partition 0000 (and optionally 0001) of your card.
- more error checking