I found some really neat stuff that I want to preserve before the floppies die; provided it still works given the fact that some of it is 20+ years old. What should I use to make a floppy image? Is it enough to just copy the files? What about copy protection etc.? Should I use a vintage floppy drive or a modern one?
What I've used for myself is Resqflpy for floppies and VGACOPY for microfloppies (with some option off so it doesn't blank 'unused' sectors in the image so I could go 'mining' in them later, and 99 retries). They're probably not the best recommended options out there and it's all a YMMV thing.
To put things in perspective, some of the stuff I found are Matrox Millennium and AWE32 drivers for Win95, all original floppies. Just to think of it, this really hints at the possibility of me playing Duke3D on EMU8k from Win95 back in the day... I was too young to now remember how the music sounded, but nowadays I know that this combination isn't optimal at all 🤣 not that much because of music quality but sampling rate and Win9x problems with the game really.
In theory Teledisk is the way of the future, but unless you're looking at something old and obscure it's probably overkill.
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img54306/teledisk.htm
I usually use RaWriteWin.
http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite
Or boot Linux and do
bash$ cp /dev/fd0 blah.img
To write a copy,
bash$ cp blah.img /dev/fd0
HD 3.5" floppy drives haven't changed much, but there are plenty of duds in the used lots on EBay.
ISA go Bragh™
Don't you have to use dd in Linux?
wrote:HD 3.5" floppy drives haven't changed much, but there are plenty of duds in the used lots on EBay.
Heard more than one claim about newer drives being not so great...
wrote:Don't you have to use dd in Linux?
The use of dd was a workaround for a quirk of device files in ye olde BSD. It has been passed down as a voodoo incantation to subsequent unices, but for Linux it is not required. I routinely image entire drives and partitions with gzip < /dev/sdaX > blah.img.gz and they restore just fine. The only problem I encountered was when there was a drive overlay (BIOS workaround for 128 GiB ceiling) installed that moved the partition table to a weird location. The kernel contained a hack to work around that specific overlay, and the hack messed with the normal block numbering.
ISA go Bragh™
Back the day, I think I remember using a program called fdformat to make images of floppy disks. Not sure if it still exists or if this was just to format disks, but that's my memory!
WinImage if you can boot into Windows. Makes copying floppies painless.
......except when you run into errors. It then turns into a painful ignore/abort/retry dialog box and a screwed copying percentage.
And besides, WinImage is still shareware. I don't like that, especially considering there's nothing it does that can't be replicated for free elsewhere with some difficulty.
