[wplug] Duping old alien floppies

[Chris Ott]

Tom Fetherston wrote:
> The dd suggestion was a good one, though I think you need to discover 
> the floppies geometry first.  fdutils seems to have ways to address that.
> One further wrinkle is that some of the 5.25 stuff I'd like to dupe is 
> on floppies that use a extra hole to act as a hard index to start 
> sectoring from.  While you might be able to image these disks off a 
> regular floppy drive, I won't be able to create a usable copy without 
> such a drive.

Yeah, hard-sectored disks could be a problem. However, I checked out the 
site I mentioned yesterday and discovered they now have a "Catweasel 
MK4" which claims to support hard-sectored disks. I imagine you'd need a 
drive that supports hard-sectored disks, though.

> I think some apple drives and C64's where of this type, would a more 
> modern FDC work with these?  These used FM encoding, not MFM.

I don't know about the C64, but the Apple used GCR encoding and soft 
sectors. The Catweasel can read those disks on a modern floppy disk drive.

Writing may be a problem. Remember, most of those drives were 40 tracks, 
while modern drives are 80 tracks. If the disks you use to write the 
copy are preformatted, they are likely to be unreadable in a 40-track 
drive. I'd recommend bulk-erasing them, first.

Chris