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Offline CdreCommodoreTopic starter

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Catweasel success stories?
« on: December 03, 2006, 02:05:31 AM »
I have a collection of 200 floppy disks from the local Amiga user group that existed in the 1980s-90s that I would like to dump and preserve.

I've been using adfread, and I've dumped about half of them.  Of course, since it's basically a hack, it took quite a long time, required many redumps and re-reading of some sectors hundreds or thousands of times, and the resulting images had to be tested with unadf.  (By the way:  thanks to Toni Wilen for making some very helpful modifications to adfread that will appear in the next public version.  :-)

The remaining half are being very stubborn and I can't get good reads off of them.  Which brings me to my question:

Can anyone tell me about any success they've had using the Catweasel to dump floppies?  How does it compare to using a real Amiga with a real double density floppy drive, or with using disk2fdi/adfread?

If I spend money on the Catweasel and I can't get any more disks to dump, it's going to be kind of a waste.  :-)  But if it worked very well, it would be much easier then tracking down a real Amiga to dump the disks with.
 

Offline CdreCommodoreTopic starter

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Re: Catweasel success stories?
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2006, 03:15:01 AM »
Quote

redrumloa wrote:
Dunno, I've never tried to use my Catweasel in this fashion. ... I have used Catweasel with UAE to read and write Amiga disks, but only in a traditional manner.


I think I may not have been clear, because I'm not sure what you mean by "this fashion", and I think "in a traditional manner" is what I mean.

I'm currently using standard PC hardware and adfread to try to dump these disks and I'm getting mixed results.  I'm thinking of either tracking down a real Amiga or getting a Catweasel.  

I'm curious to know if anyone else here has dumped a significant number of floppies using the Catweasel, and how good the results were.  It would be most interesting if someone's dumped disks with both a real Amiga and a Catweasel and checked to see if they got byte-identical results.

Edit:  Also, does the Catweasel report when it experiences some failure, e.g. an unreadable or corrupt sector?
 

Offline CdreCommodoreTopic starter

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Re: Catweasel success stories?
« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2006, 04:27:44 PM »
Thanks for all the responses (especially to Jens, who probably remembers me emailing him several times already. :-) )  I just ordered the MK4 from amigakit.com.  These are standard AmigaDOS disks, so I'm not looking to dump IPFs or anything else other than plain ADF.