Subject: Re: How can I make a disk image of a DOS 3.3 formatted 3.5" disk?
From: Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>
Date: Wed, Oct 21, 1998 931
Message-id: <362EB528.A5A11130@swbell.net>

Guido Mocken writes ...
> 
> How can I make a disk image of a DOS 3.3 formatted 3.5" disk?
> I've already backed up all my other IIgs disks by making DiskCopy 6.3
> disk images of them (on the Mac), which I am going to put on a CD-R
> soon. But I've got this one disk that is fooling both GS/OS and the
> MacOS ... Any idea?


     If you want a way to store the DOS 3.3 formatted 3.5" disk on a
ProDOS or HFS disk, there are a few ways which seem to work. (That is,
the mehods seem to work fine for storing 3.5" diskettes formatted for
DOS 3.3 via AmDOS. My guess is that it does not matter much if you used
some other 3.5" DOS 3.3.)

     Some versions of Copy II Plus-- like v7.1-- will create a disk
image if you do a COPY-- DISK to a volume _larger_ than the source
volume. For example, on a IIgs you could tell Copy II Plus v7.1 to copy
a 3.5" DOS 3.3 diskette to an 864kB /RAM5 RAMdisk. Evidently, this
feature is not available on v8.3 and later versions of Copy II Plus--
you get a "Volume Size Mismatch" error.

     GS-Shrinkit appears to produce a valid .shk file if you tell it to
create a Disk archive of a DOS 3.3 formatted 3.5" diskette (e.g. an
AmDOS diskette). This may be the most efficient means of storage since
you have the advantage of compression. Both GS-Shrinkit and 8-bit
Shrinkit appear to do fine in unshrinking the .shk file back to 800k
diskette form.

Note: I tried one test using 8-bit Shrinkit to create the archive-- it
seemed to be working okay, but, afterward, there was no image file on
the target volume!

     Another option is v5.0 or later of DSK2FILE. It seemed to have no
problem producing an image from the 3.5" AmDOS diskette. As with the
Copy II approach, you end up with an uncompressed file.




Rubywand