CP/M archive to image 8" CP/M floppies

This whole business of imaging diskettes is something in which I've had a little bit of experience... Any sort of machine-to-machine setup assumes that you have a boot diskette that enables the target system to (1) run CP/M (2) has comms hardware that you can understand and patch for and (3) has diskette hardware that you know about--or that the format on a diskette remains consistent enough that it can be accessed through CBIOS calls--and (4) has a comms port. This can turn into quite a chicken-and-egg situation. Out of the several thousand diskettes in my collection, quite a few are not CP/M; a few more that run CP/M provide no way to create an initialized system diskette from a blank; and a few that provide no access other than direct hardware manipulation to the system tracks. The next time you acquire a Future Data or Durango F-85 system, good luck with these! The Future Data is non-CP/M, uses a GCR format for recording and whose hardware is a pretty much a mystery. The Durango uses its own 100 tpi GCR diskettes, does not include a comms port as standard, and was shipped with Durango's own operating system (although I did do a CP/M port for it back in the 70's, it wasn't so simple and the CBIOS was huge). I keep some images around as Catweasel-type raw images and these are pretty good for archival purposes, but there are twists, such as hard-sectored diskettes or strange drives (say Motorola VersaDOS or Victor 9000 systems) that can make resurrecting a physical boot diskette a challenge. Another downside is since Catweasel images are essentially time-domain types, every flux transition requires 8 bits to describe, these run into the megabytes. And you can't simply look at one with hex editor to see what's there. But it's better than nothing. Tim's approach of keeping images around as SSSD A1 type images isn't bad at all, things considered. Cheers, Chuck