ocdmonkey wrote on 2021-02-17, 02:27:

I've finally gotten around to backing up a lot of my old floppies, and it's been going pretty well but the first 4 (of 5) disks for Quest for Glory 2 won't read at all. In winimage it says a disk is not in the drive, which I haven't seen before, and I even tried reading them on the only other computer I have set up with a 5.25 in floppy drive and it won't read them either. Disk 5 reads perfectly fine. The only physical difference I can see of the 4 disks is that none of them have that center ring (where as the 5th does), but carefully cutting the ring off of another disk and carefully placing it on one of them didn't result in any difference. Any ideas on what might be going on? I've already succeeded in backing up Sierra games from before and after this game came out. It does strike me as weird that Quest for Glory 2 has 5 disks while Hero's Quest had 10, but I know the game has a lot of asset re-using so I could see it.

AFAIK, the central hub is only present on 360KB floppies. The ones without a hub are 1.2MB disks .
I would hazard to guess that at least one of these is true :
a) these are not original disks from Sierra (a mismatched set from Sierra seems unlikely)
b) that either the drive that you are using is 360KB, not a 1.2MB one (or at least is configured as 360KB in the BIOS) or that it simply has trouble reading 1.2MB (high density) floppies
c) The unreadable floppies are simply degraded beyond readability

Agree with Darry ! The original from 1990 is only about 4MB and the resource files about 900k each (except #1) so 5 x 1.2Mb floppies would be about right.
My guess is that the four disks are cheaper quality and have lost data in track 0 or a FAT issue which makes the disks look blank under Winimage. You could try a bit by bit copy / bit nibbler like Copy II PC or other....

Looking at the box closely I see now that it says that it has 1.2 MB 5.25 in floppies. Strange that the 5th one is the more standard 360KB (since it's the startup disk maybe they did that so they could give a more relavent error message to those without 1.2MB drives). Anyway, I have a 360K drive in this computer because I have had a really hard time getting 360K disks to read reliably in a 1.2 MB drive. Guess I'll have to either swap it out just for these disks or re-assemble my Kryoflux setup.