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Alex_Calcan

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How do I copy a floppy to another floppy?

I have a very old floppy, it is a 1MB floppy that is very worn out, I need to get all the data from it and copy it to another one, essentially, cloning it. The problem is that the floppy is not windows formatted, it is formatted with a proprietary format and is not readable on a regular pc. How can I clone the floppy?
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Lee W, MVP
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Sorry, can't provide step by step instructions, but I can say, you can use a Linux boot CD and then use the "dd" command to create a bit-for-bit copy.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
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Alex_Calcan

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Thank you, I will try this and I will get back to you.
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JT92677
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Unfortunately the disks can not be copied. I get read errors for all sectors. Is it possible thet my drive is too new, the disks I am trying to copy are 1.0MB?
Sorry, I missed the non-standard formatting issue.

If the disk you have is a NON standard format, Windows will not read it, which is what you are seeing.

Winimage may be helpful, since it can read non-standard floppies, and it might be useful.

There were times when people came out with these non-standard disks for a variety of reasons, one of them being game programs using funky formats to avoid such duplication, and others cramming extra data onto a disk by adding an extra sector to each track, or perhaps one extra track at the end of the list.

If this is an important project, consider Winimage

http://www.winimage.com/

This might get around a non-standard formatting issue. Experiment with a standard floppy before trying to load the image of your non-standard floppy, so you understand how Winiamge works.

it will allow you to save the image to a hard drive, and to create another floppy from that image, or better, read the floppy, and copy the files to another standard formatted floppy.

Maybe this is what you're looking for.

Jeff


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