Reply 80 of 86, by DaveDDS
- Rank
- Oldbie
Btw: I personally don't like the use of ".IMZ" "compressed" disk image files, because:
-They can be comfusing to guys not intimately familier with disk images and creating/manipulating them.
--.IMGs have been around pretty much since the beginning of imaging and are very simple - raw binary sector dumps of a disk. This also means that you can tell the geometry of the disk represented by an image by it's size.
You can tell if an image is "odd" if the size doesn't match what you expect.
For example, these are the PC image formats supported by my FDI (FloppyDiskImage)
tool:
160k 163,840180k 184,320200k 204,800320k 327,680360k 368,640400k 409,600720k 737,2801.2m 1,228,8001.44m 1,474,5602.88m 2,949,120
And ... .IMGs are SIMPLE raw binary dumps of sectors. No "extra" information is included in the file - most software looks at the size of the file to determine what type of drive it represents.
.IMZ can be any size regardless of the actual disk type, meaning that type has to be encoded in the file, and you need the right software to identify it.
- This also means that if a .IMZ is slightly damaged/corrupted, good luck recovering any original data from it!
--They either can't be used "live" (running with them in a virtual machine), or a VM has to do a LOT more work to support them - having to regenerate and re-compress the whole image when any sector is written.
--They are not supported by much disk imaging software (for the above reasons)
----
IMHO the only things .IMZs can be used for is long-term storage of a disks content - so why not just use a standard .IMG and archive it using any one of many available file compression tools.
https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ; "Daves Old Computers" ; SW dev addict best known:
ImageDisk: rd/wr ANY floppy PChw can ; Micro-C: compiler for DOS+ManySmallCPU ; DDLINK: simple/small filecopy(w/o netSW)via Lan/Lpt/Com