HDDRIVER news are offered as RSS and Atom feeds. In addition the Hddriver News app for Android automatically notifies about news. Information on changes in previous releases are provided in the overview of changes and in the HDDRIVER forum.
March 23, 2025: SCSI2Pi 5.1 is available
The new release of SCSI2Pi among other things extends the functionality of the SCSI-to-USB bridge, which allows to use USB mass storage devices with the Atari and other computers just like SCSI devices, without special USB hardware or drivers.
March 18, 2025: util-linux 2.41 is available
With the new release 2.41 the tools of the util-linux package, in particular fdisk, recognize the TOS GPT partitions created by HDDRUTIL 12.5:
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdh1 34 482841 482808 235,7M Atari TOS basic data
/dev/sdh2 482842 965617 482776 235,7M Atari TOS raw data (XHDI)
Old fdisk versions only report "unknown". As usual, the new tools will be integrated in upcoming Linux distributions. Even old Linux versions can mount these partitions directly, without any special tools or kernel configurations.
January 10, 2025: SCSI-to-USB bridge
With HDDRIVER and SCSI2Pi you can use USB drives without special USB hardware or drivers. SCSI2Pi acts as a SCSI-to-USB bridge. This feature has been tested with a TT and a USB stick, a USB DVD drive and a USB floppy disk drive. HDDRIVER can boot from a USB drive, and with HDDRUTIL you can format floppy disks. USB drives can be mapped to drive A: or B:, e.g. in order to replace a broken floppy disk drive. Or you use USB sticks with MagiCMac (or MacOS), which was tested with a Performa630.
With a single external hardware an Atari now has access to emulated hard drives, removable media drives, MO drives, CD-ROM/DVD drives, tape drives (streamers), printers, network adapters, real USB drives and a realtime clock. Image files are simply copied to the Pi via the network and can be managed with the SCSI Control app, a web interface or on the command line (also remotely).
January 2, 2025: HDDRIVER 12.52 is available
The main changes in this version
- HDDRIVER: Timeout adjustment for devices with very low transfer rates.
- HDDRUTIL:After formatting floppy disks (e.g. in a USB drive) a TOS-compatible filesystem is created automatically. There is no need anymore to partition with an empty partition table.
- HDDRUTIL: Fixed a bug in partitioning with HDDRUTIL 12.5 that resulted in unusable FAT32 partitions.
December 4, 2024: HDDRIVER 12.51 is available
The main changes since HDDRIVER 11
- Manual: The download of the full version includes the up to date English and German manual as a PDF.
- HDDRIVER: The SCSI emulation for IDE/SATA drives/memory cards supports all mandatory commands of the SBC-4 specification (SCSI Block Commands).
- HDDRIVER: With TT and Falcon SCSI the SCSI Driver supports 32 LUNs (sub-units) according to the SCSI specification. This SCSI Driver extension is backward compatible.
- HDDRIVER: The code for initializing the PMMU of the Afterburner040 was extracted into an external program for the AUTO folder and an HDDRIVER module, resp. The README file in the FIXES/AB040MMU folder provides more information.
- HDDRIVER: AB040FIX (FIXES folder) was renamed to ALTRAMFX. It is required for Falcons with Alternate RAM (Afterburner040, DFB1, CT*) in order to use SCSI peripherals. The README file in the FIXES/ALTRAMFX folder provides more information.
- HDDRIVER: The Medusa Txx hardware is no longer supported. The Hades is not affected.
- HDDRIVER: Fixed a bug in the LBA-48 access mode, which is used with IDE/SATA drives > 128 GiB.
- HDDRIVER: Extended support of GUID Partition Tables (GPT).
- HDDRIVER/HDDRUTIL: With the standard settings HDDRUTIL now installs HDDRIVER without support for the SCSI Driver target interface. This saves about 3 KiB of memory.
- HDDRUTIL: The device check uses an improved/optimized query of LUNs and now also detects non-consecutive LUNs.
- HDDRUTIL: The new function "Drive->Clear Data" clears the FATs and the root directory of a partition. This is equivalent to deleting all files, but is much faster.
- HDDRUTIL: "Edit Partitions" supports changing the boot mask bit. Together with an explicit boot preference (TOS or TT SVR4) this mask determines which operating system is booted by default. Only the values $00 (not bootable, $80 (bootable TOS) and $40 (bootable TT SVR4) were specified by Atari.
- HDDRUTIL: When copying sectors the current sector number and the total sector count are displayed.
- HDDRUTIL: The "Device Check" dialog now has a scrollbar.
- HDDRUTIL: The sector test after formatting is now optional.
- HDDRUTIL: The HDDRIVER configuration export also lists the HDDRIVER version and the path of the HDDRIVER file.
- HDDRUTIL: The bus information displays whether a SCSI Driver supports 32 LUNs for a bus.
- HDDRUTIL: Depending on the bus features the device check now checks for up to 32 LUNs.
- HDDRUTIL: The function "Test Sectors" was renamed to "Read Test" because there is now also a write test for the data of a medium. This test first reads the sectors and then writes them back. Nevertheless it is recommended to save the data before a write test.
- HDDRUTIL: The list of explicitly displayed partition types in the partitioning dialog has been extended.
- HDDRUTIL: Fixed Windows-compatible partitioning of media that before partitioning were in GPT format.
- HDDRUTIL: Fixed a device check crash when no SCSI Driver was installed.
- HDDRUTIL: Support for partitioning with a GPT instead of a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme.
- HDDRUTIL: With "Edit Partitions" the GUID of a GPT partition can be changed.
- HDDRUTIL: "Restore Root Sector" has been renamed to "Repair Partition Table" and also repairs the GPT data, based on the GPT backup.
- HDDRUTIL: The compatibility settings for partitioning have been simplified.
- HDDRUTIL: The partition information exported to the clipboard has been extended.
- HDDRUTIL: Just like for Linux and Minix partitions, with "Devices and Partitions" you can also configure separately whether HDDRIVER reserves drive IDs for FAT32 partitions.
- HDDRUTIL: The "Help" buttons in the dialog windows have been removed. Each user of the full version of HDDRIVER 12 has an up to date manual as a PDF, which provides a considerably better help.
- HDDRUTIL: Numerous user interface improvements and optimizations.
- HDDRUTIL: Fixed a bug related to getting the Milan's boot parameters.