[Offer] 3.5" Floppy dumping services
I can dump 3.5" floppies if you send them to me.
I charge 10 cents per floppy, 8 cents per floppy if over 50 floppies. You do have to pay shipping for both directions, as well.
I can scan the floppies as well for an additional 5 cents per floppy, if needed (3 cents per floppy if over 50 floppies.)
Binary image and file-only backups are both possible at once by request (no extra charge)
If interested, DM me.
(I can dispose of the floppies if you don't want them back.)
Comments
Very nice. Where about are you located? What hardware do you have to dump floppies (SuperCard Pro, Kryoflux, Tanscopy, Macintosh, FDC that passes all TestFDC tests?)
I'm in Missouri in the USA. I have an XP machine with upwards of like 5 USB 3.5" floppy drives on it. (I'm planning to get 2 5 inchers and maybe an 8 incher later. I use USB ones since they draw less power and can sometimes be faster.)
i've never heard of any of those, I just use WinImage, since it's actually... good.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, but I just use a raw binary dump for Mac floppies and write it to a floppy image with DOS (since it doesn't need to have a valid filesystem to read/write raw to a floppy)
Do your USB floppy drives at least support 720k low density disks? Many don't. You won't be able to dump DMF or oddball formatted floppy disks with a simple USB floppy drive.
Anyway, if you get a 5.25" or 8" drive you will need either a real FDC, Kryoflux, or SuperCard Pro. Kryoflux/SCP are needed to dump copy protected disks.
Winimage is good and very friendly, but it can only really handle bog standard MS-DOS formatted 360k/720k/1.2mb/1.44mb floppy disks.
You might want to check out our comparison of current disk archival tools: https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/7877/a-comparison-of-current-disk-archival-tools The review is a few years old but nothing has really changed since then.
Of course no one can anticipate all possibilities. Even I'm not set up to archive 100tpi 5.25" disks, Twiggy disks, Amstrad 3" (not 3.5") disks, or 9-track tape.
Even many IDE 3.5" floppy drives in conjunction with MBs from the early 2000s and later will not read DMF disks (i have an ASUS Athlon XP board from 2002 like that). The BIOS said it was capable of reading 2.88 MB floppies but I doubt it.
DMF is not like 2.88MB. If you have a 2.88MB drive, you also need a 2.88MB disk. This is nothing special, these boards will read it for sure.
DMF is some kind of "squeezing a few k more into 1.44MB".
If that was an LS-120 drive, then no those did not support 2.88mb. 2.88MB (ED) floppy drives were usually only found on high end IBM and NeXT equipment and were not very reliable. Bioses and FDCs continued to support those mainly because the higher 1000KBS FDC data rate was also used by tape drives and the emulated 2.88mb form is used to make bootable CDs.
Of course, now we are getting in to a completely different area of removable media. Bernoulli disks, LS-120 cartridges, several incompatible sizes of iOmega Zip disks, Jaz drives, and so on. The difference here is little or no commercial software was ever distributed on these forms of media - they were just for personal storage.
DMF did in fact squeeze more data on a 1.44mb disk. The "raw" capacity of a 1.44mb disk is 2MB, but some of the space is used as a gap between sectors. The gap is very important as if there is to little, then drives may overwrite adjacent sectors due to variation in motor speeds. By decreasing the gap one can fit more sectors on a track, but this somewhat reduces reliability writing. However since this is not an issue for READING, Microsoft commonly used it for distribution media.