Disklavier

Hi all,

Apologies if I'm repeating stuff people already know, but hopefully it
will help some people:

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Please note: doing this might well be against the Yamaha license, and I
accept no responsibility for any damage / loss of data / earthquakes /
flying pigs appearing that might occur from the following!
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Anyone who has ever tried to read the files from "protected" Pianosoft
disks will know they are unreadable in a PC as Yamaha put an invalid boot
sector to make Yamaha think the disk is unformatted.

There are some utilities around which will make a copy of a protected 720k
floppy and write a valid boot sector so that Windows / others can read the
data on the disk. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software for
doing the same with 1.44MB (2HD) disks (although if you have Linux it's
easy).

If you wish to unprotect one of these floppies (ideally make a backup copy
of the disk first) you can use a utility for Windows called "rawrite"
(which is usually used for making Linux boot floppy disks) to put the boot
sector back on. I have attached the boot sector from a floppy disk to this
email.

Grab RAWRITE.EXE / RAWRITEXP.EXE from your favourite Linux site /
distribution, such as a mirror of the Slackware ftp:

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-8.1/bootdisks/RAWRITEXP.EXE

Then write the attached image file to the disk, and you should then be
able to read the disks in Windows and make use of the conversions utils in
dkvutils.zip as you would on a 720k disk. I've tried this on a couple of
my 1.44mb protected floppies and it appears to work great. I guess
theoretically it would work on a 720k disk too, but I don't have any to
try it out on.

Hope this is of use to someone :)

James

----- James R Fry - email/MSN james.fry@... - ICQ 4607456 -----
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