Greetings, I'm in possession of a reasonably complete set of SVR3 media (and associated drivers, diagnostics, etc.) for the AT&T 3B2 on 5.25" QD floppies. Sadly, I no longer have any 3B2 hardware, but with luck one day I may change that. I had planned on imaging and preserving these disks for my own use, if nothing else. But it occurs to me that I don't know how rare they might be, and I might do harm by attempting to read them in an EBay'ed PC floppy drive (albeit with cleaned heads). Is this material sufficiently preserved that I don't need to worry about damaging my copies? I didn't see any 3B2 related bits on bitsavers and a cursory google search didn't turn up much. I have a few disks with duplicate contents, so I risked a test run with Unix dd and got a sane-looking complete image with no I/O errors, and no material shedding off the floppy that I could see. I still need to see if the bits are good at a higher level (I think they are formatted as "S5" filesystems, not sure). But I'd have no problem shipping the floppies to a respected member of the community who does this kind of thing all the time (e.g. bitsavers), if it would be worth their time. thanks, -Andy

Is this material sufficiently preserved that I don't need to worry about damaging my copies? I didn't see any 3B2 related bits on bitsavers and a cursory google search didn't turn up much.