4 Feb
2016
4 Feb
'16
12:29 p.m.
> Is there a utility that will read .IMD diskette
archive files and
> recover the data?
"Data"??!?
Well, you already have the DATA, every last bit.
Maybe what you want is the INFORMATION, in the form of the FILES.
All too often, people will use "data" to describe the contents, which
could be at MANY different levels. And, of couse, some will be shocked,
amazed, and offended that anybody could possibly interpret something so
obvious in any way other than as they do.
From .IMD files, with appropriate additional software,
it is possible to
recreate a "clone" duplicate on a disk, a binary image
file of all of the
bytes on the disk (in the order that they appear on the track),
as mentioned next:
On Thu, 4 Feb 2016, curiousmarc3 at gmail.com wrote:
Yes, if you download the original imd, in the package
there is a simple
to use command line utility to do just that. Writing from memory,
IMD2BIN.EXE or something like that.
OR, a copy of one or all of the sectors on the disk (with or without the
"metadata" of the headers), the files from the disk (requires software
that understands the filesystem), or the information within the data
within the files (obvious with a glance at a Wordstar file without
Wordstar, and grossly and horribly apparent trying to derive text from
Weird, WordPervert, or any other "modern" word processor)
[And, of course, in situations OTHER than this one, one can not always
look at the world as "files" consisting of a sequential stream of bytes.]
While it is, of course, obvious [to you] what you mean, you need to be
aware that some of us have bizarre alternate interpretations of what it
means to extract the "data" from a disk or disk image.
curiousmarc3 seems to assume that you want a file containing the bytes on
the disk in the order that they are on the disk (BTW, sectors are not
always in consecutive order, and files can be fragmented all over a disk),
whereas I am assuming that you want a bunch of separate files, each of
which contains the bytes that were in a file on the original disk, and
rearranged into the sequence that they were within those files on the
original disk.
From Data, we can derive Information.
From Information, we can derive Knowledge.
(That is the "DWI pyramid" of
Information Science.)
Most of us have extended that to include:
From Knowledge, we can derive Enlightenment.
(literally thousands of
independently derived postulates)
A few of us have extended that to include that Data is derived from Chaos,
and that Chaos is derived from Enlightenment.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com