DiskImage: How does it work?
 

There must be an easy and embarrassing answer to this, but I can't figure it out so I'd appreciate it some help.

I installed DiskImage on my A1200 but I can't get it to work. What I do is this (in shell, but using the GUI gets me the same result):

-I mount the drive DI0: by double clicking it in Storage/DOSDrivers
-I type DiskImageCtrl unit 0 insert test.adf (a DOS disk I'm using to test it)
-I then type DiskImageCtrl to confirm that I did it correctly, and sure enough, the following line is on top of the list:
unit 0: DI0: "HD:A/4/TEST.ADF" (read/write)

The question is, what then? I thought I'd only need to type DI0: in Shell to access the contents of the disk, but when I do I get an Unknown command error.

What am I doing wrong?

If you open Storage/DosDrivers/DI0 in a text editor you'll see that it refers to L:CrossDosFileSystem. If you don't have CrossDosFileSystem in L it won't work. And if the ADF disk is not PC formatted, it will be unreadable. Likewiese DI1 uses FAT95. DI2 and on don't have a file system explicitly specified, so they probably use the default Amiga file system (a.k.a. OFS).

Obviously these are only examples and you need to make a DIx which suits your needs. DI2 is probably ready for your use, it looks like a 880k geometry with Amiga file system. Didn't try it, though.

If I try to mount DI2-DI4, they give me the mysterious error message:
'BootBlocks' is not a valid keyword (file 'DI2', line 24, column 1)

DI5 gets mounted but if I try to access the ADF I get a not a valid DOS disk message, which is not true.

Just remove the BootBlocks line from the dosdriver. It's for an older (or newer?) version of the Mount command.

The DI5 device is for MS-DOS HD floppy disks. Please read the comments in the files. They are there for a reason.

I hear you Thomas, but shouldn't all this be in the documentation? It doesn't occur to me to open the files of every program I download in a Text Editor. :)

Anyway, I shouldn't complain about a great (not to mention free) piece of software. Thanks to you, I got it to work. Cheers!

Yes I had the same problem with diskimage, it is a very powerful program with great documentation, except very little information about the mountlists!

The mountlists themselves which are provided have some comments in but they're not very helpful, and I had to work a lot of it out for myself.
I came up with a mountlist for FFS HDF hardfiles that works (tested hundreds of times) but I still dont fully understand some of the entries.