A whole bunch of Disk archiving questions...

[dangerman <thedangerman007@yahoo.com>]

I was curious about a number of things related to transferring disks
for archiving and emulator purposes, and I would love to hear from
others who do it often about the best way to get the most accurate and
error free transfer possible.

For instance - Do you run something like DARK (Disk Repair Kit) on the
actual Apple II if you run into read errors?  Is it best to try the
data recovery on the Apple II itself, or to use a copier that ignores
read errors and do data recovery on the emulation end?

Among the Apple II family of disk drives - are there ones that are
more tolerant of errors or a drive that is better at reading poor
disks or disks with a weaker magnetic signal?

Should I run speed tests on all my drives to find which is one is the
most within spec and use that?  What utilities are out there to
determine drive speed and is there anything that I could run that
would tell me if one drive was "better" than another?  The duodisk is
loud enough to wake the dead when it encounters an error...

Right now I've been using Copy II+ 7.1 on my Performa 450 with //e
card to transfer 5 .25 images to 3.5 and then on from there.  So far
I've been doing personal data and Applesoft programs on plain vanilla
DOS 3.3 floppies - which has worked fine.

I'd like to start transferring disks with copy protection and from
what I've read - probably the best practice is to use SST to create
halves and then merge them with Ciderpress?

Are there copy protection schemes that SST cannot handle?

My Apple II Transfer Options:

Apple II+ with Disk ][

Apple //e with DuoDisk

Apple IIGS with grey 5.25 & 3.5 drives

Performa 450 with IIe card with grey 5.25 drives

(I also have a Catweasel card and a Central Point Software Deluxe
Option Board, 2 ISA cards for PCs that can read Apple disks and Mac
floppies - I'm trying to get an older PC that can use both cards for a
sweet copy solution that could handle most anything).

So add me to the list of people that wants to archive original,
uncracked game disks.

Along those lines, anybody have anything interesting they've found
hidden on unused sectors of game disks or the like?

I believe Akalabeth for instance, has an HGR screen that isn't
actually shown during gameplay.

I wonder if running the undelete programs can turn up anything cool on
some of these disks as well?  Though I suppose a weird dos and/or
different methods of factory duplication would prevent any of that
info from coming through.