Hi. I'm finding myself spending a lot of time on ImageDisk (by Dave Dunfield), archiving and writing images with it. However, one major annoyance is that frequently when writing an image to a disk, the writing process is VEERRRY slow. When it's working fine it blasts through the sectors and writes a full 1.44MB disk in less than a minute, but many times it switches to this slow mode and each track takes about 6-8 seconds by itself, as the sector numbers at the top of the screen are spelled out slowly one by one while writing.

I don't know what triggers this behavior, so I thought I'd ask here if someone experienced this before.

For the record, I get this behavior on three different machines: a 25MHz 486SX, a 75MHz Pentium, and a 3GHz Intel Xeon! Each has its own drives of a different vendor, so I'd rule out the machine cause.

I also tried with a clean DOS boot with no TSRs at all, or a full boot with HIMEM and EMM386, DOS 6.22, DOS 7, all the same.

One thing I felt might be related, is that I get images in IMG format and convert those to IMD using an ImageDisk auxiliary cmd-line tool (BIN2IMD). Images that were originally ripped with ImageDisk tend to write fast more often than not. The reverse seems to be with images converted with BIN2IMD.. but at this point I might be just hallucinating.

So anyone saw this? Could it be some setting I stupidly set? I usually leave everything at default, and just specify single-step and double-sided.

Here is a video of the slow writing in action (nevermind the kid voices 😅):
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AlvI4XBO1MPXnUm4mULNoTYwjTZH

Cheers!