10 Apr
2007
10 Apr
'07
11:14 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 10 Apr 2007 at 3:24, Jules Richardson wrote:
Out of interest, do you always do this for "unknown" media as a matter of
course - or would you normally read a single track between index pulses, do
some software analysis to see what it is, and then go back to re-read more
than a single disk revolution?
I suppose in an ideal world I'd assume that catastrophic failure of the media
could happen very quickly - so priority is to get a snapshot of the disk onto
modern storage before that happens. In other words, it'd be great if "the
device" (be it CW or whatever) imaged enough in one pass, rather than
requiring a read / analyze / tweak read-again cycle.
In reality I've not seen many floppies (at least not 5.25") fail spectacularly
- but I have come across a few.
I suspect it's just to read disks that
don't start the track at the index
pulse (I'd wondered the same thing until his post about Amiga floppies).
The buffer on the CW is large enough to record much more than a
single revolution of a diskette, so when dealing with diskettes of
this type, I fill it up with larger sample.