Tony,
An instrument slightly more to your taste than a PC might a 16500b logic
analyser. Perhaps you've already got one. I believe these can work with
both LIF and MSDOS floppies and uses an IDE HDD (which can painlessly be
replaced with CF card) in DOS format internally. I don't know if it will
handle other than 3.5" formats but it's quite possible that the support for
those formats is generic and it might work, given an appropriately mangled
hardware interface.
-adrian