25 May
2000
25 May
'00
6:57 p.m.
John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
The 'dd' approach has a few failings. One,
it's not tolerant of
bad sectors, right?
No, but then not much PC software is. I normally only worry about
making disk images of good disks; I don't have any use for preserving
bad ones. Assuming that it made sense to save an image of a partially
bad diskette, how would you represent bad sectors?
Two, I think you'd need to be sure that your
box's settings could handle all the old variations of disk capacity
from the old days.
As I mentioned, Linux *has* /dev/fd0xx variations for all of the common
PC disk formats. If you want to save an image of something bizarre,
it's definitely the case that you'll have to do something fancier, but
I don't recall anyone asking for that.
Three, raw disk images aren't easily searchable
and indexable in the same way as 'tar' or 'zip', but of course those
formats wouldn't handle the boot sectors.
For dos diskettes, it's just about as easy as tar or zip when either
using mtools, or mounting the image file using the loopback device.