MicroDrive Partition Format

Primary Sources

General

The MicroDrive Turbo is an Apple II IDE controller with DMA support. The card allows IDE hard drives to be attached, and includes a Compact Flash card socket. The card was designed by Joachim Lange of ///SHH Systeme and first released in 1996.

Layout

Block 0 holds the partition map, which defines up to 16 partitions. The first partition always starts at block 256.

The partition map is defined:

+$00 / 2: magic (0xccca, 'JL' in little-endian high ASCII)
+$02 / 2: number of cylinders
+$04 / 2: (reserved)
+$06 / 2: number of heads per cylinder
+$08 / 2: number of sectors per track
+$0a / 2: (reserved)
+$0c / 1: number of partitions in first chunk (0-7)
+$0d / 1: number of partitions in second chunk (0-7)
+$0e /10: (reserved)
+$18 / 2: romVersion for IIgs; indicates ROM01 or ROM03
+$1a / 6: (reserved)
+$20 / 4: start LBA of partition #0
  ...
+$3c / 4: start LBA of partition #7
+$40 / 4: size, in blocks, of partition #0
 ...
+$5c / 4: size, in blocks, of partition #7
+$60 /32: (reserved)
+$80 / 4: start LBA of partition #8
  ...
+$9c / 4: start LBA of partition #15
+$a0 / 4: size, in blocks, of partition #8
 ...
+$bc / 4: size, in blocks, of partition #15
+$c0 /nn: (reserved)

All values are little-endian.

The partition size values are in the low 3 bytes of the size fields. The high byte is used "for switching drives in a two-drive configuration", so the size values should always be masked with 0x00ffffff.