Yes, normal diskettes (that are bootable) can be copied / written with winimage.

What it WONT write, are diskettes with special / magic sectors,(Which was the basis for a lot of copy protections), or apple low density 800k GFR diskettes. (PC floppy controller does not speak that encoding language!) You'll need a greaseweasle or kyroflux for that.

Now I'm wondering what went wrong because the disks aren't booting. Perhaps Symantec's boot disks are different and have the special/magic sectors as you mention.

Actually, cancel what I just said. WinImage is working fine. The problem was when I made the image using Symantec's software, or maybe the diskette itself is starting to fail. I made a fresh one, copied it with WinImage, then put it back on another diskette and it works and boots fine now.

But while we're on topic, is VGACopy probably the best thing for copying in DOS?

There were various utilities for this in DOS.

The best ones knew how to work with extended memory, to hold the disk image there, so a single drive could be used.

As for 'special / magic sectors', I was meaning more like those used by legit oldschool diskette versions of Dungeon Master.

There are several sectors on these disks with 'ambiguous' RLL encodings, that will not read the same bit patterns consistently. *rather, the controller interprets the pattern as different series of 1 and 0 state oscillations, based on very tiny differences and random noise, because the encoding us purposefully ambiguous.*

The disk controller will *NOT* create such ambiguous encodings, because they are unreliable (even if 'valid'.)

This means the diskette wont be copied correctly when read to an image then written. The controller will write a different, nonambiguous encoding there instead, based on what interpreted on THAT read.

The copy protection that uses such sectors, just read the sector several times, and say OK if it reads differently on some of the reads.

VGACopy used to be my best tool in the time (1990s), then ImageDisk came and it's more feature-rich IMO.. but you lose the nice interface and the "Welcaaahahhaha" and "Reeeading" voices 😅

WinImage will make your image bootable whether you like it or not as it writes its own cruft into the image. I wouldn't trust it for imaging boot floppies.

leileilol wrote on 2024-07-24, 15:19:

WinImage will make your image bootable whether you like it or not as it writes its own cruft into the image. I wouldn't trust it for imaging boot floppies.

Are you sure? It only does that when creating an image anew with it, in which case it is free to put whatever it wants in the boot sector. But if you are reading a disk to .IMG then writing it back, the result is exactly as in the .IMG without any additional crap. The same goes for VGACopy as well when using its internal format function.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-07-24, 19:15:

Are you sure? It only does that when creating an image anew with it, in which case it is free to put whatever it wants in the boot sector. But if you are reading a disk to .IMG then writing it back, the result is exactly as in the .IMG without any additional crap. The same goes for VGACopy as well when using its internal format function.

AFAIK WinImage is indeed accurate to the logical sector level, so if you Open then Format+Write a supported disk image it will always be written fine (this, of course, doesn't affect Win9x's volume tracker crap) including any non-file sectors...

...HOWEVER I did say "supported": it's still a "get files in and out of FAT images"-centric program and will refuse to work with images that don't contain a supported filesystem, so if you insist on a GUI, http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite is nice!

As already said a standard IBM-compatible FDC can't write many "exotic" low level formats (get a Greaseweazle for those), while in DOS you have even too much choice but ImageDisk (by our @DaveDDS) and Rawrite2 (um, along the downloads of most every turn of the 2000s Linux distro?) are solid options 😀