Disk archival techniques

[Randy McLaughlin]

From: "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 6:39 PM


> While the goal is certainly simple (to be able to generate duplicates
> of odd diskettes without requiring human manual intervention), there
> does not exist a method of describing a disk format in a practical way,
> that does not require SOME manual handling of exceptions.
>
> Although the number of exceptions is theoretically finite,
> for ANY proposed specification, one or more of us can come
> up with an exception.  Therefore, it remains necessary to
> retain a "comment" field to be able to specify additional
> "weirdities", especially if the spec is to be opened up
> enough to deal with "copy protected" disks.
>
> OTOH, it would be gross overkill to store the complete bitstream
> without clock separation of every track on disks that could be
> defined as "5.25 DSDD 48TPI WD/IBM 5SPT 1024BPS, no known oddities",
> just because SOME (a few thousand) disk formats DO have strange
> things to deal with.
>
>
> --
> Grumpy Ol' Fred     cisin at xenosoft.com
> Some disk formats:  http://www.xenosoft.com/fmts.html

Soon PC's won't be supporting floppy drives at all, you must consider the 
fact you are communicating information to someone that doesn't know of the 
formatting at all.

It is best that within the archive in general an explanation of what is 
"standard" i.e. for floppies how a 765 formats for a couple of PC formats, 
then for different formats be able to compare against the "standard".

This information should not be included for every media image but within an 
archive in general.


Randy
www.s100-manuals.com