VGAcopy and DXP.

The first one seemed to do better copies and detect bad tracks / sectors. DXP could only copy unprotected floppies, but could compress data and put commentaries on the image (also, it made EXE images so no unpackers were needed).

KryoFlux is probably the way to go eventually. I don't like the advanced formats in general, they're all only kind of marginally useful before they have support in DOSBox.

WinImage serves me just fine so far; it's read my damaged disks with enough retries. Haven't had the program or 98SE meddle with disk contents, including boot sectors. I'm still looking for recommendations for the DOS-only scenario as well.

ddrescue under linux. It's designed for reading dodgy disks. It will maintain a log of any errors so that those sectors can be reattempted later, without losing the existing progress. You can even piece together an image from multiple drives if you find that they're having errors in different places.

WinImage here too, no problems so far but in saying that I've never really had to use one of my backups 😀

I usually use a tool that generated uncompressed 1:1 binary images of a disk for simple data. This has the advantage that it can be used by various programs, like *.VCP from VGACopy and *.IMG for Winimage, which is interchangeable.

In DOS I like to use VGACopy or DCP.
In Windows WinImage is ok, despite its really bad interface.

For everything else I use KryoFlux.

for some reason I never liked VGACOPY, is there a link for DCP? Is it disc-copy-pro or something?

It is this one ftp://retronn.de/dos/Disk_Tools/DCP.EXE

I wouldn't use WinImage for any imaging anymore after its read error dialogs you'd have to accept and its unsolicited replacement of the boot sector.

oh, DCP is really nice , thanks for that elianda!!!

here are my vgacopy-collections. I still use this today because it's great.
http://forum.classic-computing.de/index.php?p … 91806#post91806

DCP.. "DCP" always reminds me of an operating system from former eastern Germany. 😉
Operating system DCP (translated),Rare Robotron EC 1834 computer

WinImage for me too. It's so simple to use a USB FDD under Win10 to write working DOS floppies I haven't really bothered to try anything else. These days very few programs seem to work fine with the latest hardware and Windows, so I can't really say anything bad about it. Then again, I don't use it for backups or other important stuff, only for transferring DOS files.

leileilol wrote:

I wouldn't use WinImage for any imaging anymore after its read error dialogs you'd have to accept and its unsolicited replacement of the boot sector.

I'm not quite sure how people manage to screw up their boot sectors with the program. I have to assume they had already lost the original boot sectors for one reason or another.

Does WinImage change the boot sectors always ?
Even if it is only beeing used to dump original floppies/media ?

No.

Windows can overwrite the OEM string in a boot sector unless you keep things write protected. Viruses can overwrite them too, or disk copies may not reproduce original boot sectors. Don't know under what conditions those WinImage images with replacement boot sectors are made, assuming even that their source is an actual disk.

Zup wrote:

VGAcopy and DXP.

The first one seemed to do better copies and detect bad tracks / sectors. DXP could only copy unprotected floppies, but could compress data and put commentaries on the image (also, it made EXE images so no unpackers were needed).

Sorry, I thought we were talking about DOS software to make floppy images.

Out of DOS, my choice would be old reliable dd. It can only copy unprotected and undamaged floppies, but being so simple has its advantages.

I've been using Daniel F. Valot's ARDI and/or EMT tools since 1995 when I ran DOS and OS/2.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150731070645/ht … :80/emtcopy.htm

The website can be a bit confusing and it seems like older versions are no longer available unless you visit archive.org. Even then, many of the download links are bad or incorrect. Versions 4.36 and 4.39 were solid for both DOS and Windows. I have uploaded them to the VOGONS Drivers page. Here's the link for this excellent software:

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1081

This is very good software that seems to be quite obscure. I think it should be saved for posterity.

wow VGAcopy, i remember i used it sometimes but i can´t really recall for what game i used it , or what was the PC Game that needed that software.

On the other hand I DO remember the WIN95 floppy discs needed something like 1.7mb and there was a special program to make a copy of those discs but i can´t remember the name of it.

Thanks for all the replies so far.
Being weird the only DOS ones I liked were HD-Copy (with it's issues) and DCP elianda pointed to. But for different reasons none is up to the task so now I am convinced kryoflux is the way to go... even when making standard IMG files with it the result must be superior.