> well, I would but in 9 of 10 cases, the disk
> ends up totally empty. nothing to boot...
How can you tell it's empty?
Many demos/games have dummy filesystem that makes the floppy appear empty, but the actual demo/game data is read by the bootloader from the disk blocks. Only very few demos/games have their files on disk using the filesystem. Most of these appear NDOS to system, but no all.