dd shouldn't care about the data in the sectors. So unless they use sectors that lay outside the 1.44mb thing you might be safe to go, but I am no expert on that.

DOSBox might miss the functionality to read corrupt sectors though. I never looked into that.

corrupt sectors from floppy images or real floppies? The first requires some
special format (doubt the usual .img supports sector annotations like that), the latter
might not be passed to dosbox anyways.

Well I tried using dd to write the Lemmings image back to another disk and then using that disk in a real machine and Lemmings could tell it wasn't the original, so it's probably a limitation of the .img format.

I also tried mounting the real floppy in DOSBox, but as wd mentioned it isn't recognized as the original because DOSBox is unable to read the real disk at a low enough level.

It's all good, though, because I can crack it.

Edit: Well I think I've made it through my 3.5" floppy collection, which is much, much smaller than my 5.25" collection (both in terms of original game disks and miscellaneous personal disks). This is because I was without a 3.5" drive for a very long time, and once I did get one it wasn't long before I also got a CD-ROM drive. I've attached my 3.5" ripping notes/list in case anyone is curious.

A few game disks were sadly lost to the ravages of time, with issues ranging from a bad sector in a file to being completely unreadable. The last disk of The Two Towers had a bad sector in the empty space right at the end, so I just copied off and zipped up its file(s) instead of making an image. Fortunately, I think I have 5.25" disks for most of the games with bad 3.5" disks, but I don't know how well 5.25" disks generally hold up compared to 3.5" ones (hopefully better due to the lower density).

I also skimmed some miscellaneous stuff off of non-game 3.5" disks, including a half-dozen TSRs that let you run CGA programs on Hercules video cards, a backup of First Publisher, some MIDI and MOD music, and a whole bunch of backed-up game save files.

Total 3.5" haul was a little under 30MB. I expect to get several times that from 5.25" disks though. My goal is to put it all onto one CD-ROM as well as leaving the files and images on my 2TB hard drive (that I use for storing videos, ISOs and other backup/archival stuff) so that I can access them from DOSBox.

Edit 2: Oops, found more 3.5" disks in the garage. Will update my list after I go through them.

Edit 3: Finished ripping this second cache of 3.5" disks and updated the attached list. Will probably tackle the much larger 5.25" collection over xmas break in a few weeks.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to whether there is any point to using something like FDA (Floppy Disk Analyser) or CopyIIPC+Snatchit instead of Linux's dd or FreeDOS' raread to make backup images of copy-protected disks?

Will DOSBox IMGMOUNT even be able to mount images made by those programs?

I think I'm okay with using stuff like dd to backup my original disks to image files and then cracking the games to work in DOSBox, but I thought I should consider those other options.

I'm also wondering whether I should rip my 5.25" disks using Ubuntu, or FreeDOS. I found dd quite painless to use in Ubuntu for my 3.5" disks, but I was putting them in my FreeDOS/Win98 machine to view the volume labels using dir a:\ because I didn't know about the mlabel -s utility. I also haven't tested raread on FreeDOS yet to know if it's as good as dd or not.

Will DOSBox IMGMOUNT even be able to mount images made by those programs?

Unlikely if those programs use special image formats.

I'll probably just stick with the more straightforward programs then, since my main goal is to be able to play backups in DOSBox instead of on a retro PC.

HunterZ: Good luck with your quest 😀

WolverineDK wrote:

HunterZ: Good luck with your quest 😀

It's gone well for my 3.5" collection. The only disks that have had problems are ones that weren't originals, or that I have 5.25" versions of too, or that I was able to recover by doing file-by-file copying instead of image ripping.

I'm dreading having to hook up a bunch of 5.25" drives though to find a 1.2MB one that works the best (I know I have at least 3-4, none of which have been used in a long time), so I probably won't get around to it until around xmas unless I get really bored at some point.

I did dig out my tub of flattened game boxes and their contents (manuals, disks, etc.) last weekend, and had some fun looking through it. I'm thinking I must have another box somewhere, though, because I didn't see everything I was expecting (found the box sleeves for Fire Hawk and Quest for Glory 2, but am missing the ones for Thexder and QFG1 VGA, etc.) so I might have to look around in the closet and garage to see if I can find them.

I also need to locate my stash(es) of personal 5.25" disks, which have lots of old shareware and stuff that I got from dialup BBSes and whatnot.

Went through my bin of game boxes and their contents again last weekend. Turns out I wasn't missing a box/tub of game boxes, as I found my QFG1VGA box and I think my Thexder box must have gotten lost or thrown out at some point. I do still have the original disks, which is the important part.

I then took stock of my main stashes of original 5.25" game disks, which turned out to be mainly Sierra games (at least by number of disks), and found just about everything I was looking for. I'm not sure what happened to Rasterscan, which I'm eager to rip because it's a booter; I'm hoping that it got mixed in with some of my non-game disks or something.

While digging for my AWE64 Gold in a closet earlier tonight, I found my 5.25" floppy drives in a more accessible location than I thought they were in. One of them is a beige Teac FD-55GFR P/N 19307351-49 and the other is a black 1987 Mitsubishi MF504B-312U. All of the mechanisms and electronics are uncovered and unprotected because that's how they used to do it, so of course they were full of dust until I blew them out with a can of compressed air.

I decided to hook up the Teac (it looked a little less intricate than the Mitsubishi, so I figured it had a higher chance of working) to my old PIII-550 Win98SE/FreeDOS dual boot box and it powered up fine while sitting on top of the case (no sense in mounting it inside for a job like this). I started putting random non-game 5.25" disks in and reading them in FreeDOS. The first one didn't work, but I realized it was a single-sided disk that must have been for something else like a Tandy CoCo/Dragon. The second worked when I did a 'dir a:' but had a read error when I tried making a test image file with raread. The next disk I found actually had dust on the disk surface itself where the read opening is; it was of course pretty much completely unreadable. Finally I found a 1.2MB disk that had 900KB of some kind of driver files from 1988 - raread was able to quickly make a 1.2MB image file of this that was mountable in DOSBox!

I should probably swab the drive heads with rubbing alcohol, but the Teac seems to be working fine so I might just go with it as-is. I'm pretty excited, as it's been a good 10-15 years since I've visited some of these games, but they'll have to wait until tomorrow evening as it's time for bed here.

Just in case you want to use that 5.25 on a modern PC: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503

DosFreak wrote:

Just in case you want to use that 5.25 on a modern PC: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503

Wow! Never thought this is possible! I have a special attachment with these 5.25" disks and drives, since I grew up with them, literally! 😁

(When I first saw a heap of 3.5" disks at a computer repair shop, I noticed the metal plate at the back of one, and asked my cousin who was with me, about what is "that thing" - he answered "hard disks".)

Not till the end of my 286 era, after which, I left for pre-university, that I managed to install a 3.5" drive.

Now, I make sure all my classic PCs have the 5.25" drive.

DosFreak wrote:

Just in case you want to use that 5.25 on a modern PC: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503

I want one like this for my 2.88MB floppydrives 😀
I do have an external parallel 2.88MB floppydrive but USB is what I really want!

Good to know there's a way to rip 5.25" via USB, but it looks like that's all it can do. I think I'd only invest in a USB-floppy interface if it could also read/write and show up as a normal floppy drive in Windows. Issues like this are why I want to image all of my game floppies now while I still can.

Ripped Destination: Mars! (an educational game) and Out of this World (aka Another World) without problems using WinImage in Win98.

Tried ripping Arkanoid 2: Revenge of DoH and it complains of bad sectors, possibly due to copy protection (floppy acts as a key disk when you run the game from the HDD, just like Lemmings and Thexder and old Sierra AGI games). I then booted to FreeDOS and tried using raread and it crapped out immediately for some reason. Finally, I tried installing the game to my HDD in FreeDOS, and it had some read errors while running install.bat. After reinserting the disk and hitting Retry a couple times it finally installed and runs fine.

Since I didn't have trouble ripping protected 3.5" floppies like Lemmings to image files using dd under Ubuntu Linux, I want to try using Ubuntu on my PIII-550 since that should be easier than trying to hook the 5.25" floppy drive to my AMD Athlon 64 X2 Ubuntu/WinXP desktop. The only other option is to just copy the files off the disk and put them in a ZIP archive. I could tell WinImage to ignore the bad sector(s), but I don't want to do this because it's possible that they're legitimate sectors that the drive is struggling with rather than copy protection sectors.

Well, Ubuntu+dd seems just as sensitive as Win98+WinImage to the rough spots on my Arkanoid 2 disk. I don't regret installing Ubuntu, though, as I now have Grub to choose between Ubuntu, FreeDOS and Win98, and dd does seem to access the floppy drive differently because the drive makes different sounds.

dd also utterly failed to rip my Ms. Pac-Man disk, which is a booter. I might try booting it and/or ripping with FreeDOS+raread and/or Win98+WinImage before writing it off as a loss.

Cabal (which I seem to remember to be copy-protected with the key disk method), Deluxe Paint II, Hyperspeed (yay!), Megaman and Megaman 3 all ripped fine using dd. Actually, Megaman took 3-4 tries before dd was able to successfully read a dodgy sector, but in the end I got dd to run all the way through without complaining.

I'm starting to remember things about floppy usage that I thought I had forgotten, like re-inserting a disk when it has a read problem so that the drive heads have to recalibrate to the disk...

If you have a troublesome disk that dd barfs on, try using dd_rescue instead, it can skip over unreadable sectors. You may have to do a bit of repair work on the resulting image (fsck / chkdsk when mounted), but it might help you in reading some disks that are borderline.

HunterZ: isn't it great to re-remember stuff ? It is no wonder why I want to have a triple boot on my minipc comprising of XP Home (English) already installed, and then I want Lubuntu and Freedos on the same little fellow.

megatron: dd has a parameter to skip errors too, but it sounds like ddrescue might have a lot more useful features.

Since I was able to install Arkanoid 2 to my HDD, I might be able to use ddrescue to help splice good data from my installed copy of the files back into the bad spots in the image.

Wolverine: Yeah, I now have Ubuntu, FreeDOS and Win98 triple-boot on my PIII-550 just to help with ripping floppies. Was thinking maybe I should replace Ubuntu with a lighter-weight Linux distro though...

HunterZ: what about Lubuntu ? that only takes 50 megabytes of ram, which is "ludicrous" if we think of any MS OSes in comparison and their demand for some SERIOUS amounts of ram.

Maybe, although I was thinking maybe it'd be a nice excuse to try a Linux distro that isn't a variant of Ubuntu.