First read is always with IMD 1.18. Saves an image of any type of disk, GCR notwithstanding

chris2021 wrote on 2022-03-29, 23:42:

Sometimes you only get 1 read, if that. Trust me.

Yep - first read is always to take an image. Finally got around to imaging a set of Visual Basic 3.0 Professional Edition floppies the other day which had been waiting far too long. All disks had read errors though with some effort I managed to successfully image all but disk 6. I hit read read errors on a few tracks towards the end that no amount of retrying would get past. Once I was done the disk was no longer readable by either Windows or WinImage - both complained there was no disk in the drive.

Thankfully other people have broken the rules and uploaded disk images to certain websites. So I was able to grab someone elses disk image, diff all the files and replace the one damaged file in my disk image with a good copy.

I use WinImage (a registered copy!) - IIRC 6.4 on Windows 3.11 and whatever the current version is on my Windows 10 machine. I used to have an LS-120 drive which was wonderful for problematic disks - whenever I couldn't image a disk successfully on a normal floppy drive the LS-120 would almost always succeed. Sadly feeding the LS-120 drive only the worst disks means the heads eventually got dirty and the only way to clean them is with a special cleaning disk I've never even seen before. Really must get around to buying a fresh drive.

For most disks use Winimage on a good older OS box. For very old/odd 180k/360k use a CopyIIPC card in the 486 box but have not had to do that much for many years. Image Disk is a good DOS alternative to Winimage as Max said.