VOGONS


First post, by AeonG

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Forgive my ignorance on this topic, I am not well informed on it, will probably ask some dumb and vague sounding questions: A while back, I remember coming across a project for making high integrity floppy images that actually required hardware to do. the hardware connected to different floppy drives, and could connect to the actual computer by USB If I remember right, it was compatible with many different kinds of floppy drives. Looking at it now, I actually cannot find any trace of this project online anymore.

1. Does anyone know what project I am talking about?
2. Is there any advantage to this method over just ripping it through software?
3. Does this method only apply to floppies only? Is software like Magic ISO (which I personally use) more than adequate enough to make a high quality ISO file?

I am asking these questions, because I am looking for the best way to archive things that will make them last the longest.

Reply 1 of 4, by astonsmith

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That sounds like KryoFlux, although other similar projects exist, like Greaseweasle.

Instead of just extracting the user-accessible data, they sample the magnetic recording on the disk itself, i.e. in an analogue fashion. This can be good for copy protected disks because they often did things like have weak sectors (where data bits were deliberately recorded too weakly, so could be read as 0 or 1). It is also possible to work out if the disk has been modified because those areas of the disk will have a stronger recording due to being newer.

Reply 2 of 4, by AeonG

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astonsmith wrote on 2021-09-17, 10:41:

That sounds like KryoFlux, although other similar projects exist, like Greaseweasle.

Instead of just extracting the user-accessible data, they sample the magnetic recording on the disk itself, i.e. in an analogue fashion. This can be good for copy protected disks because they often did things like have weak sectors (where data bits were deliberately recorded too weakly, so could be read as 0 or 1). It is also possible to work out if the disk has been modified because those areas of the disk will have a stronger recording due to being newer.

Yes that is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks! Though I'm not sure that answered my 3rd question: Can the same process be applied to copy protected CDs? Is it necessary? I want to know this, because the era of software I usually archive is mostly on CDs instead of floppies.

Reply 3 of 4, by ntalaec

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For floppy disks, if you don't have a KryoFlux and the floppy doesn't have any kind of protection, use any software (like WinImage) that dumps in RAW format (IMG/IMA). If it's protected, you could try Teledisk or ImageDisk: http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/index.htm

For CDs the best option is DiscImageCreator: https://github.com/saramibreak/DiscImageCreator
It's the software used in redump.org, but it requires specific drive models for dumping CD-ROMs.

If you don't have any of the recommended models, you could use Alcohol 120%. In Alcohol 120% don't use ISO or CUE/BIN formats, use Alcohol MDS/MDF format instead.

Reply 4 of 4, by Stiletto

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For floppy disks, the available flux dumpers/reader solutions have multiplied drastically over the years.
I think that currently the best synopsis of every available dumper is by ArchiveTeam: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Rescuing_Floppy_Disks

Some solutions that were previously Amiga- or Atari- or Apple-specific have expanded towards handling PC drives/formats, plus other solutions have become available.

Personally, I usually don't recommend using KryoFlux, their software license has had some significant issues with regards to the preservation-minded, especially for commercial users. (See the above wiki page for more on this.)

And I'd keep an eye on Pauline and Applesauce in the coming years.

Again, you only need flux readers for copy protected disks, which doesn't get too crazy in the PC scene, but flux readers can be quite useful when dealing with data recovery issues.

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For optical drives, the issue becomes much more significant especially if you want to archive copy-protected discs, or weird non-PC formats.

No "flux level readers" exist currently for optical media - most drives do not provide access to the raw data, so everything gets interpreted by the drive's controller and its firmware, then the drivers for the OS, then the OS - or something like that. Drives were generally designed to try to make it somewhat impossible. I am aware of several attempts to hack up specific drives to attempt to get access to raw data, as well as some deeper CD drive emulators, but for the most part, nothing's ready for prime time yet.

In theory, right now, one could hack up an old laserdisc player that can read audio CDs to read out CD-ROMs, and use the Domesday Duplicator (https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978 ) to read out the data, but no one's tried yet. Audio dumping is proven possible though this way - definitely overkill though for audio CDs, which are typically unprotected.

ArchiveTeam has a rather short synopsis: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Rescui … g_optical_media

Redump.org has a quite nice tutorial set if you want to get crazy (especially if you want to understand what I am getting at further in my post here): http://wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=Dumping_Guides

Unprotected CD-ROMs, you can normally just rip to ISO or BIN/CUE or something, you usually don't need any weird image formats or special drives. ISO doesn't handle Redbook audio though, IIRC, so you need to use another format.

Sarami's DiscImageCreator has been pretty nice, but that whole scene surrounding it tends to focus on the fact that you need specific drives with special vendor-specific drive read codes when reading certain non-PC formats, like Plextor optical drives, rather than seeking to solve the problem of needing these very specific drives, which can be in short supply. increasingly as the years go on.

I call this sort of "you need a Plextor" way of thinking "voodoo" or witchcraft, and I am all about ending the days of voodoo! People should instead seek to gain control of the drives, so that as much as possible can be dumped with the drive you own!

That's why I'm a firm supporter of the Aaru Data Preservation Suite (formerly known as DiscImageChef): https://aaru.app/ / https://github.com/aaru-dps/Aaru/
(I only wish I could spend more time helping out!)

It has the goal of doing everything that DiscImageCreator can do - and then some. (If I can get an open-source complete replacement for IsoBuster finally after all these years, I'll be one happy dude!)

Aaru can dump anything ATA, IDE, SCSI, USB-MSC, USB-UAS, PCMCIA-ATA, CompactFlash, SecureDigital, MultiMediaCard, and whatnot 😀 so it can even dump floppies with a USB drive if that fulfills your needs.

A one-woman show, claunia has set her project's scope as wide as possible, impressively including on-game-console disc reading/dumping, broad portability, and many other specialist features. Mostly so far it excels at disc image creation and file extraction, but someday will support image mounting and image modification for every image format it supports, which is considerable, and even more (currently) than DiscImageCreator.

Some of the weirder things that currently only Aaru can do:
- the only FAT extractor that supports Sharp X68000 filenames and OS/2 extended attributes
- the only implementation of the LisaFS
- the most complete ISO9660/HS/CDi implementation ever written 😀
- and, not sure, but maybe also the only one able to extract from Apricot floppies and HDDs (Winchesters 😀 )

Whether she will reach the finish line, IDK. But her goal is to get such control over optical drives that acquiring Plextor drives to dump specific kinds of discs would be a thing of the past. She's basically already there for some discs. (At the moment, you basically need to trade out Plextor drives for LibreDrive with Aaru, but there's a lot more compatible LibreDrives out there... I suspect this will only expand.)

Support for her own image format (*.aaruf, *.aif if you're using an older version) is still quite limited, and mostly extends to Aaru itself, SabreTools Media Preservation Frontend (MPF) (a frontend), and GamePres.org's RedBookPlayer (https://github.com/aaru-dps/RedBookPlayer ). There's been a little chatter with steering MAME's CHD image format in the direction of Aaru's image format (public: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/7402 , cannot comment on our private chatter) but progress has been slow.

I think I'll give Aaru its own thread on VOGONS when version 5.3 comes out (pretty soon now), so that you guys can all start hammering on it, but claunia's way too busy to handle user support herself here... (as am I...)
[edit] I finally gave it a release announcement: Aaru 5.3.0 LTS - Aaru Data Preservation Suite (released 2021-10-01)

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BTW, in chatting with claunia (author of Aaru) tonight, BTW, she had this to comment:

AeonG wrote on 2021-09-17, 10:28:

Magic ISO (which I personally use)

claunia wrote:

Magic ISO NONONONONONONONO NEVER.
when we launch Aaru 5.3 I'll do a blog post including many of the failures of MagicISO and PowerISO

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ntalaec wrote on 2021-09-17, 13:13:

For floppy disks, if you don't have a KryoFlux and the floppy doesn't have any kind of protection, use any software (like WinImage) that dumps in RAW format (IMG/IMA)

claunia wrote:

This is known to corrupt images.

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ntalaec wrote on 2021-09-17, 13:13:

If you don't have any of the recommended models, you could use Alcohol 120%. In Alcohol 120% don't use ISO or CUE/BIN formats, use Alcohol MDS/MDF format instead.

claunia wrote:

Alcohol 120% will make wrong images of any DVD that's not -ROM

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I suspect that's all I'll have time to pass on for now though! 😀

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto