Disk archival techniques

While the goal is certainly simple (to be able to generate duplicates of odd diskettes without requiring human manual intervention), there does not exist a method of describing a disk format in a practical way, that does not require SOME manual handling of exceptions. Although the number of exceptions is theoretically finite, for ANY proposed specification, one or more of us can come up with an exception. Therefore, it remains necessary to retain a "comment" field to be able to specify additional "weirdities", especially if the spec is to be opened up enough to deal with "copy protected" disks. OTOH, it would be gross overkill to store the complete bitstream without clock separation of every track on disks that could be defined as "5.25 DSDD 48TPI WD/IBM 5SPT 1024BPS, no known oddities", just because SOME (a few thousand) disk formats DO have strange things to deal with. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com Some disk formats: http://www.xenosoft.com/fmts.html