Reading various format 5.25" floppies on a PC

OK, apologies first as this has been done to death at various times in the past, and now I come to need the info I haven't got the willpower to piece it together from archives of several thousand posts :-) I'm trying to organise and back up all my data (primarily on my main PC system) - but I'd also like to make images of the disks for some of my classic platforms whilst I'm at it. I don't have any kind of fancy floppy controller, just whatever comes in a standard PC (I do have PCs running Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows NT, Linux and DOS so I'm not too fussy about OS choice) I have various 5.25" floppy drives lying around, although I *assume* the 1.2MB drive will electrically read all of my 5.25" disks (whether the controller can understand the raw data coming off the disks is another matter of course) I've got disks for the following machines which I'd like to initially back up: Acorn BBC / BBC Master / Cambridge Workstation (I believe these are all the same low-level format even if filesystem structure is different) DEC Rainbow (B model, if there's a difference between that and the A) Apple (Apple ][, //e and /// - again I believe low-level structure is the same for all 3?) So, in an ideal world, what I'd like to be able to do is use some piece of software on the PC and suck an entire image off each disk, archive it onto tape / CD / whatever, then at some point in the future be able to use the same software on a PC to rebuild from those disk images such that they'll work in the machine they were intended to. I'm not even going to think about the Amiga and Mac 3.5" disks for now; I know the PC controller won't handle those - and all the stuff on cassette tape can wait too! :-) (the couple of Macs I do have might be a better bet for this job, but unfortunately none of them are networked and so I couldn't get the data off them to a place where I can store it easily) cheers Jules ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/