thank you
b
On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 11:38 AM David Schmidt via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Following up: I published an update to this tool that
helps make "bad"
rips more square. ImageDisk will create an IMD file that faithfully lacks
sectors that it can find no trace of. So reading marginal media that has
unreadable and unlocatable sectors will have a track that is perhaps
shorter than tracks that came before it because it's lacking unfindable
sectors. Worse than that, IMD will decide that's the new norm and stop
looking for that sector on later tracks as well (unless you have it analyze
every sector which is slow, but at least it improves fidelity in reading
marginal media). That's a different problem. For cases where you're
missing a sector here or there and the rest of the sectors are fine within
tracks, this new option to fill in missing sectors will help.
Recall that the function of IMDU and this tool (imd2raw) is to take a rich
IMD image and linearize it into a raw image. That image really needs to be
square in order to have it make any sense because there's no metadata
anywhere to explain where or why a sector might be missing. So the only
reasonable thing to do in this situation is to pad out the missing sector
with zeros or xE5s so that subsequent tracks and sectors can be located
reliably with consistent offsets. The default behavior is still to be
exactly like IMDU was, but the optional –f or --fill-missing parameter will
make this change for the output image and indicate missing sectors with a
'0' in the graphical display.
https://github.com/RetroFloppy/imd2raw