Bitwise copy of floppy disk

[Arthur Rhodes]

I have a floppy disk with a proprietary format. I don't know exactly
what the format is. It's created on a drum machine.

I'd like to make duplicates of this floppy. Making copies with the
drum machine is extremely slow and tedious, so I want to do it with
my computer.

How could I do that? Windows can't read the floppy since its
format is unknown and probably not supported. All I need to do is make a
bit for bit copy of the floppy to another floppy.

Does anyone know how I could do that?

Thanks

 

[philo]

I have a floppy disk with a proprietary format. I don't know exactly
what the format is. It's created on a drum machine.

I'd like to make duplicates of this floppy. Making copies with the
drum machine is extremely slow and tedious, so I want to do it with
my computer.

How could I do that? Windows can't read the floppy since its
format is unknown and probably not supported. All I need to do is make a
bit for bit copy of the floppy to another floppy.

Does anyone know how I could do that?

Thanks

Maybe a utility such as WinImage would do the trick

 

[Newbie Coder]

Arthur,

What if you format the floppies in the computer first, use them in your drum
machine & then try to copy them?

Also, can't you install the drum machine as a MIDI device?

 

[Todd H.]

I have a floppy disk with a proprietary format. I don't know exactly
what the format is. It's created on a drum machine.

I'd like to make duplicates of this floppy. Making copies with the
drum machine is extremely slow and tedious, so I want to do it with
my computer.

How could I do that? Windows can't read the floppy since its
format is unknown and probably not supported. All I need to do is make a
bit for bit copy of the floppy to another floppy.

Does anyone know how I could do that?

The unix command dd does what you describe.

You can find any number of bootable Linux CD's that you can boot into
and that won't touch your environment otherwise. This one is nice and
light: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page You'll download an .iso
image of the bootable CD and use your favorite CD burning program (EZ
CD Creator, Nero, a Windows ISO burning plugin) to take that iso (a
recorded CD image) and make it into a burned Cd. Don't make the
mistake of trying to take the ISO file itself and stick it on a
regular CD-R as a file.

Once you have that CD, boot to it, and from there, I'd try this:

dd bs=1 count=1474560 if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy.img

Swap a fresh disk into the drive and then:

dd bs=1 count=1474560 if=/tmp/floppy.img of=/dev/fd0

You may have to massage the count to match the disk size. With a
block size of 1, you're taking raw blocks of the floopy drive 0 and
stickin them in a temp file, and the next command just does the
opposite.

If you're a linux newbie, you can find all the details on the dd
command using the man command (man is for "manual"):

man dd

Another tack you can try using that same bootable cd is to try the
partimage program (a Ghost clone). I've never played with it with
floppies though.

Let us know how it turns out. It sounds like a fun little experiment.

Best regards,

 

[Peter Foldes]

Start\Run a:\copy and follow prompts

 

[Todd H.]

Start\Run a:\copy and follow prompts

This doesn't work...but it did trigger an alternate solution to my
unix dd-based solution that might be one hell of a lot easier. Boy
it's been years since I've copied a floppy.

Look into the DOS diskcopy command.

c:\> diskcopy a: a:

It will prompt you to swap disks as appropriate. If the help for
diskcopy is to be believed, it makes a sector by sector copy of the
disk, and should work on any format.


Best Regards,

 

[Andy]

Diskcopy
Copies the contents of the floppy disk in the source drive to a
formatted or unformatted floppy disk in the destination drive. Used
without parameters, diskcopy uses the current drive for the source
disk and the destination disk.
<http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../xp/all/proddocs/en-us/diskcopy.mspx?mfr=true>

 

[Holger Petersen]

I have a floppy disk with a proprietary format. I don't know exactly
what the format is. It's created on a drum machine.

I'd like to make duplicates of this floppy.

How could I do that? Windows can't read the floppy since its
format is unknown and probably not supported.

Does anyone know how I could do that?

Just try ANADISK and/or TELEDISK. They work best under pure DOS.
And/or ask in comp.os.cpm; especially for download-sites.

Good luck, Holger

 

[Paul Randall]

There are an endless variety of ways to make it difficult to make copies of
floppies. Specialized software can change the number of sectors per track
or write its own stuff in the intersector gap, or whatever. The popular
computer magazines used to have ads for software and machines that could
'copy any format'. If you don't get an error when you view a directory of
the floppy in Windows, I would give WinImage a try. I assume you have
googled for the drum machine's name and the words copy floppy.

-Paul Randall