On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 2:08 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > Hi, > > n00b alert > > Does anyone have a 101 level boot strap guide for someone wanting to get > into creating better-than-dd disk images? > > I'm finding myself back in a position where I want to image / preserve > multiple 5¼ & 3½ inch disks. I think all of them are PC compatible > disks. Probably standard FAT-12 and a handful of super capacity disk > formats from the likes of IBM / Microsoft where they tried to squeeze > 1.6 (?) MB on a 3½ inch disk.
If they are 5¼ & 3½ inch disks which are not copy protected and are readable with standard PC compatible floppy controllers, but not necessarily limited to standard DOS formats, and you had a older PC with a floppy controller which you could set up to boot into real mode DOS, I would start with Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk program. See a link for ImageDisk 1.19 here: http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/ Even if a disk is in a standard DOS format, it can be helpful to have an image of the disk rather than just a ZIP of all of the files copied off of the disk. In one example I was trying to run a setup program from a set of files extracted from a ZIP and copied back to disks and the setup program blocked when it was necessary to change installation disks because the next disk didn't have the expected disk label. Of course the disk labels weren't saved in the ZIP, while they would have been saved in images of the disks.
