Re: Converting .DSK images to 5.25" floppy (part 2)

["Charlie" <charlied@NOSPAMbboard.com>]

"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message
20031103134842.26109.00000275@mb-m16.aol.com">news:20031103134842.26109.00000275@mb-m16.aol.com...


> Since my primary interest
> was _reading_ Apple II disks, I would have been willing to re-read
> several times to get a track read--a way of tolerating the timing
> glitches caused by interrupts in the PC/Windows environment.

If you just want to _read_ Apple II disks, you might want to try Disk2FDI (a
shareware program by Vincent Joguin).  It allows you to read Apple II 5.25"
disks on a PC with no unusual hardware.

I have been "playing around" with this program for a couple days and I have say
that it does what I thought was impossible.  It reads a disk and saves it to a
disk image in about one minute (longer if the original disk has bad sectors).

You do have to re-arrange the sectors on the image to make them usable in an
emulator but every byte of data is there.  In case you want to try it I found
the following to work.


Disk2fdi  should be
sector #
--------  ---------
       0  0
       D  1
       B  2
       9  3
       7  4
       5  5
       3  6
       1  7
       E  8
       C  9
       A  A
       8  B
       6  C
       4  D
       2  E
       F  F

A couple other things to note:

You have to have two floppy disk drives on your PC (only one has to be a
5.25").
It won't work on Windows XP/2000/NT.
I don't think it will work on the flip side of Apple II disks.
You can't write to the Apple II disks with the PC.

It is supposed to work for other non-PC disks as well but I haven't tried it.

Here's a link:

http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi

Charlie