Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

HxC Floppy emulator support for all others Keyboards/Samplers...
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Aries
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Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:18 am

Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Aries »

I have an Yamaha mx100a into which I have installed the HxC emulator based on the Gotek hardware. After a small bit of fiddling this is now working but only if I format the emulated disk on the Yamaha. If I bring the usb storage back to pc and load the HFE file that the Yamaha has formatted the disk utility informs that the format is not dos.

I did find this on the web http://www.carolrpt.com/disks.htm that seems to suggest the disk format is not exactly recognizable by a Pc. Note the bit about the boot sector (see section about formatting disks).

Is there any way to add copy files to and from the HFE images? Maybe support for this Yamaha disk format can be added?

Thanks
-J

Aries
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Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:18 am

Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Aries »

I have placed an HFE file on my web server at the URL below. This HFE was formatted by the piano and it successfully reads and writes to it... this is the format that I'm hopeful there is a way to interact with using the HxCFloppyEmulator or something similar to allow transferring files.

http://aries.spacelink.com/disklavier

Jeff
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Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Jeff »

I have patched the image to make it readable with the DosDiskBrowser (in the hxc software)
DSKA0000.hfe.zip
(31.6 KiB) Downloaded 513 times
Can you check that you enable to read/write it with the yamaha ?

Aries
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Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:18 am

Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Aries »

Wow Jeff.. that was fast! Thanks.

Yes it did work properly in the piano as well as in the being readable in the tool. What did you find was the difference between the tool formatted image vs the piano formatted image?

-J

Jeff
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Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Jeff »

Aries wrote:
Sat Apr 21, 2018 9:45 pm
Wow Jeff.. that was fast! Thanks.

Yes it did work properly in the piano as well as in the being readable in the tool. What did you find was the difference between the tool formatted image vs the piano formatted image?

-J
I have just copied a dos boot sector to the image. the Yamaha seems to don't use it. But it doesn't also fill it during formatting.
If you add a file to the disk image with the tool, can you read it properly with the yamaha ?

Aries
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Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Aries »

Jeff -

Yes, I can read and write the image successfully with the tool and it works as expected in the piano. So seems the issue is just this boot block not being present on piano-formatted disks.

Might it be possible to make the tool tolerant of that missing block, or perhaps give an ability for the tool to create/correct it if missing?

-J

Jeff
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Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Jeff »

Aries wrote:
Sun Apr 22, 2018 12:54 am
Might it be possible to make the tool tolerant of that missing block, or perhaps give an ability for the tool to create/correct it if missing?
Definitively no, because you can't be sure which partition type you have on the disk.
The yamaha format is not standard and i suppose that all partitions parameters are hardcoded into the piano firmware.

anyway the process is :

convert the HFE into IMG
copy a 720KB DOS bootblock to the first 512 bytes of the IMG.
convert back the IMG to HFE.

i suppose some shell scripts can be done to do this job.

Aries
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Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:18 am

Re: Yamaha disklavier disk format ...

Post by Aries »

Thanks Jeff.. I'll do that.

-J

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