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Software backup/Imaging suggestions?

Cosmo

Well-known member
Posted this on FB, but not everybody's there so here..
 
Any software suggestions for imaging / reading Macintosh 3.5" disks (400k, 800k and 1.4Mb) more deeply than just using i.e. Diskcopy? 
 
Have hundreds of disks to image/read and would like some more "bit-level" software to get it done.
 
Yes, these are private data, and mostly not commercial software, but disks might have read-errors or somekind.
 
Not going Kryoflux level of rescue however on this :) ....yet.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I use DiskCopy 4.2 for creating all my floppy disk images.  I've been told that it stores additional information about a disk and is important to people for some reason.  So that's what I use.  Apparently you have to use the real DiskCopy 4.2 itself, not DiskCopy 6 creating DiskCopy 4.2 images.

 

lameboyadvance

Well-known member
AFAIK 400k/800k disks store extra data on their disks (tags?). This data is not copied by the later versions of Disk Copy, and since some old stuff used this extra storage part of the disk is lost when you copy it with a later version.

For 1.44MB disks either should be fine for copying.

 

bigmessowires

Well-known member
A sector on a Macintosh 400K/800K floppy contains 512 bytes of data and a few bytes of tags - either 12 or 20 bytes, I can't remember at the moment. 99.99% of Macintosh software ignores the tags. In fact, I've never seen any Mac program that uses the tag info. Tags are basically a hold-over from the Lisa. Yeah, 1.44 MB floppies don't store tags at all. Diskcopy 4.2 copies the tag info. Later versions of Diskcopy don't.

There's a disk copy program called Copy II Mac that *might* do something closer to bit-level copying, but I'm not sure. It may just duplicate what Diskcopy 4.2 does. Any program that does bit-level floppy access would have to bypass the Sony driver in the Mac's ROM, and control the IWM chip directly, which is not a small task. 

Do you know for sure that the disks you need to copy are using a form of disk-level copy protection? Like non-standard sector headers or sector sizes? It not, then I don't think there's a need for anything other than Diskcopy 4.2. If you're concerned about read errors, then you could create multiple images from each floppy, and diff them to verify they're identical.

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
According to the interwebs, Copy II Mac does bit-level copying.  It will even copy disks that have bad sectors.

To save as a disk image, you have to use Copy II Hard Disk.  I'm gonna snag a copy and try it out.  I have a couple games that didn't want to copy using Disk Copy 4.2 (would get a read error at the end), but I could copy them manually.  I wonder if they had copy protection.

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
Some further Googling reveled there's another app called FEdit.  It's another bit level copy program for Macintosh.  This one was shareware, and a popular alternative to Copy II Mac.  However, it doesn't appear to save disk images.

Would be really handy for cracking copy protection, though.

 
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bigmessowires

Well-known member
I've used FEdit before. Unless I've overlooked something, it's not a disk copy program, although it might be useful in reverse-engineering disk-based copy-protection schemes. It's basically just a hex editor - or so I thought anyway. I'll have to take another look.

 

Cosmo

Well-known member
Cool! Your image link seems to be broken - correct link is http://www.mrpijey.net/temp/drive_comparison.jpg

If these are 400K single-sided disks, what are the side 1 test results from your chart?
Those were not my tests however, there's good article about Macintosh floppies and Kryoflux at ; http://goughlui.com/2013/04/21/project-kryoflux-part-3-recovery-in-practise/

I am trying to find more 3.5" drives as two of what i got recently do not work at all..

 
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