SystemDisc disc tool

SystemDisc is the second of the family of DiscTools to be released by Piccolo Systems, and is a general-purpose tool for managing the system software on modern RISC OS systems. The benefits of using SystemDisc over the pre-existing solutions include:

• Easily and quickly initialise new SD cards for booting your RISC OS system, entirely from within RISC OS
• Detect and fix common problems
• Use the entirety of large SD cards for RISC OS data
• Bring the benefits enjoyed by Raspberry Pi users, who don't require a separate boot USB stick in addition to an SD card, to other RISC OS platforms - you get the increased speed of SDFS, and less clutter on your desk too!

Modern RISC OS systems, such as the Beagleboard, Pandaboard or Raspberry Pi, feature a built-in SD or micro SD card reader. You need to have a memory card inserted into this slot when you power up the board, because their CPUs expect to read files (often known as firmware or bootloaders) from which will in turn load RISC OS itself. These expect the SD card to be formatted with a FAT format - a format whose roots can be traced to MS-DOS or even earlier.

SystemDisc is a flexible tool for creating and working with these dual-format media. With SystemDisc, you can:

• Take a card, formatted to a size of your choice using HForm, and create a FAT-formatted boot partition within it of a size of your choosing
• Check the health of the boot partition on an existing card
• Fix a number of common problems that can occur with boot partitions

The current version is 1.04. This item is delivered by email and requires RISC OS 5.