Reading various format 5.25" floppies on a PC

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sun Jun 15 18:57:00 2003

OK, apologies first as this has been done to death at various times in the
past, and now I come to need the info I haven't got the willpower to piece it
together from archives of several thousand posts :-)

I'm trying to organise and back up all my data (primarily on my main PC system)
- but I'd also like to make images of the disks for some of my classic
platforms whilst I'm at it. I don't have any kind of fancy floppy controller,
just whatever comes in a standard PC (I do have PCs running Windows 2000,
Windows ME, Windows NT, Linux and DOS so I'm not too fussy about OS choice)

I have various 5.25" floppy drives lying around, although I *assume* the 1.2MB
drive will electrically read all of my 5.25" disks (whether the controller can
understand the raw data coming off the disks is another matter of course)

I've got disks for the following machines which I'd like to initially back up:

  Acorn BBC / BBC Master / Cambridge Workstation (I believe these are all the
same low-level format even if filesystem structure is different)

  DEC Rainbow (B model, if there's a difference between that and the A)

  Apple (Apple ][, //e and /// - again I believe low-level structure is the
same for all 3?)

So, in an ideal world, what I'd like to be able to do is use some piece of
software on the PC and suck an entire image off each disk, archive it onto tape
/ CD / whatever, then at some point in the future be able to use the same
software on a PC to rebuild from those disk images such that they'll work in
the machine they were intended to.

I'm not even going to think about the Amiga and Mac 3.5" disks for now; I know
the PC controller won't handle those - and all the stuff on cassette tape can
wait too! :-)

(the couple of Macs I do have might be a better bet for this job, but
unfortunately none of them are networked and so I couldn't get the data off
them to a place where I can store it easily)

cheers

Jules

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Received on Sun Jun 15 2003 - 18:57:00 BST

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