What software do I use to put floppies as images on a hard disk?

Question

I still have a large number of floppies. On some of them there probably is source code I don't want to lose. I also don't want to take look at each one individually, as that's going to take a lot of time. What software would be best for copying all data to a hard disk, preferably while creating an index at the same time?

I would also be interested in imaging mac floppies, but it doesn't have to be on the same machine.

[responses]
The goal is to finally get rid of all those boxes with floppies. I was asking about images as xcopy doesn't copy all (hidden?) sectors, does it? Is xxcopy better?

I don't want to type a name for each floppy.

Disk Utility on the mac probably needs a bit too much keyboard or mouse action, but might be appescriptable

Answer 1

I am not too sure of your goal. Somehow, what you need is a robot, inserting the floppies, copying, etc. :-)

I would just make a bunch of empty folders, insert disk, do select all and drag to nth folder. Or use something like xcopy or xxcopy to transfer recursively data from floppy to folder. Etc.

Answer 2

DOS? Why don't you just create yourself a batch file which makes a new folder in a prescribed location which is named as the current timestamp and copy the contents of your floppy drive over. That way you can watch TV while you insert floppies and run your batch file. As long as you put them into the drive in a known order you can identify which one is which by sorting the resulting folders by timestamp.

Not sure what the equivalent would be on the mac, but I'm sure there is one.

Edit: I think everything you should need is in here

Answer 3

Here is a script I used on my Linux box to perform the same type of task. Basically I just a raw image of each disk to a folder. I had another script I ran later that mounted each and dumped a directory listing into a file.

#!/bin/bash

floppydev='/dev/sdb'
savepath='/srv/floppy_imgs'
while true
do
  echo "Press a key to create an image of the next floppy"
  read -n 1

  dd if=$floppydev of=/dev/null count=1 2> /dev/null
  errlvl=$?
  #if the disk isn't in the drive then wait
  while [ $errlvl -ne 0 ]
  do
    sleep 1
    dd if=$floppydev of=/dev/null count=1 2> /dev/null
    errlvl=$?
  done

  filename=$(date +'img-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S.flp')

  if [ ! -f $savepath/$filename ]
  then
    echo "creating image as $filename"
    dd if=$floppydev of=$savepath/$filename
    errlvl=$?

    if [ $errlvl -ne 0 ]
    then
      echo 'the image copy failed!'
      rm -i $savepath/$filename
    else
      mlabel -s -i $savepath/$filename ::
      md5sum $savepath/$filename > $savepath/$filename.md5
      echo "copy complete"
      echo " "
    fi
  fi

done

Answer 4

Use rawread and rawrite.

There may be various implementations, the first one I found was this: http://www.pamarsystems.com/raw.html

Answer 5

I've used WinImage with satisfying results.

Answer 6

On the Mac, you could probably use the Disk Utility to convert the floppies to DMG files - but I haven't had a Mac floppy drive in years, so I can't test that theory.

Answer 7

On OS X maybe you can simply use DD?