68k MFS: sector by sector hex dump

[Paolo B]

Hi guys, bad weather out there, some time to squander... Long story short: I decided to start deep diving into MFS, which is very basic and sufficiently document in the Inside Mac and in the manual of the rather excellent Fedit software. Because... Why not?
Beside Fedit, the Norton Disk Editor can open MFS volumes.
Both applications are indeed good, but seem to be limiting the export of sectors content to just physical printout. Maybe for discouraging piracy or whatever.
Is there any 68k application or workflow that could dump selected sectors or even an entire 400k MFS disk to a hex format (Bin Hex works at single file level)?

 

[Crutch]

Isn’t this just a disk image? Have you tried making a Disk Copy image and examining the hex?

 

[Paolo B]

Disk images are binary dump… in disk image format, so there’s some overhead on top of the original disk data.
Eventually, I found out that Fedit can open and save each sector individually. What I am missing is some early 68k tool which can take hex and save as string equivalent, in a way data can then be edited with a simple text editor. I am sure there’s something out there for this simple task…

 

[joevt]

Not all disk images have the overhead of a header. Check the first block of a disk image to see if it is a header or if it is part of the disk data. The disk image needs to be not sparse and not compressed.

In Mac OS X, you would use dd in Terminal.app to read and write blocks and xxd to convert between binary data and hex text. My dumpvols.sh script uses those commands to examine blocks of a disk.

In classic Mac OS, the closest thing to a terminal is MPW. I don't remember if MPW has an equivalent to dd and xxd. One can create MPW command line tools to do the job. They are written like Unix command line tools using the concepts of stdin and stdout and args.

 

[Paolo B]

Thanks for the insight. My goal would be to have everything done on one 68k Mac, preferably a plain 68000. I’m only missing something that can take binary and convert to “hex text”, byte by byte. If nothing pop ups, could be a funny project for reviving my acquaintance with Think Pascal.

 

[Crutch]

Yeah you’ll probably just have to write it. “I want a text file with an ASCIIfied hex dump of a whole volume” sounds like a pretty bespoke use case.

 

[eric]

BBEdit 5 has a binary to text ASCII hex feature FWIW