Need good disk dump utility

[Jim Leonard]

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> Is there anything in Linux that will dump a disk image and put blank space
> where bad sectors are?  It's not certain if dd does this.

I wrote disk2img that you can get from the www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper package; 
source included.  When it encounters a sector it can't read, it fills it with 
"!" in the image file.

Without specialized hardware, your best bet for imaging disks (for the purpose 
of recreating them in the future) is probably copyiipc used with "snatchit". 
Snatchit was a pirating tool in the mid 1980s that interfaced with copyiipc and 
dumped its memory buffers to disk, and could read them back to recreate the 
disks.  The format is proprietary and the software only runs on pre-1990 x86 
hardware, but if you want to image diskettes, even bad/wacky/protected formats, 
it's the easiest way to go.

It's much more competent than anadisk, but the proprietary nature of the 
process is probably a huge turn-off.  If you need both programs, let me know 
off-list and I can make them available.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)                    http://www.oldskool.org/
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