17 May
2015
17 May
'15
5:10 p.m.
On Sun, 17 May 2015, Fred Cisin wrote:
Why bother? As most people suggest `dd' is the most straightforward way,
and on a reasonable OS you can then mount the filesystem directly from
such an image of a floppy via a loop device. You can then copy individual
files out from there if really needed. You can copy the boot sector
separately with `dd' too if required, also from that image rather than the
original.
With defect-free media, which is usually the case with properly stored
diskettes made up to mid 1990s, in addition to what has already been
written I'd suggest the block size of 32768 with `dd' to get a decent read
performance. The performance of individual floppies may vary depending on
how they have been formatted, i.e. if any sector staggering has been used.
Also, from experience, with marginal media you may still be able to read
data out eventually with a linear dump such as `dd' performs, while
copying files out individually that involves random seeks may not be as
successful.
Maciej
The only
reason I guess is that they're bootable disks. Otherwise a simple
filecopy is more than enough :)
If they are bootable DOS disks (and normal, not weird), then there is one part
that won't come across with a filecopy. That is Track 0, side A, sector 1. If
they are some version of DOS for which you don't have a copy of the
boot-sector, that might be worth saving. Using DEBUG, you can copy that into
RAM, and save it as a 512 byte file.