3.5 floppy imaging

[John Wilson]

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 08:32:18PM -0700, steve shumaker wrote:
>I'm looking for a tool to do a bunch of 3.5 floppy imaging using a linux or a
>windows box.... Media is all early PC stuff.    Any thoughts, comments, tools
>of choice?

Can't be that early if it's 3.5!  But OK.  Is your point the imaging, or
the doing?  I got a floppy duplicator machine off eBay years ago and I'd
highly recommend one of those if you have a large qty to read.  It's just
a vanilla FD235 drive, and you talk to the mechanical parts over a serial
port using a simple protocol.  So one of these would be great for cranking
through huge stacks of disks w/o having to sit there for hours.

>Is IMD the format of choice for these as well or is there something else for
>the newer formats?

I can't imagine why you'd use anything but a straight image, since that's
what the most tools will know how to look inside ... unless your purpose is
not to use the stuff from the floppies now, but just to retain the ability
to run off duplicates some day w/o storing the disks in the mean time.

John Wilson
D Bit