How to save my aging amiga floppies

[Techx]

Hey all, So I have several boxes worth of old amiga floppy disks. I'm sure many are corrupt but there may be some that still have good data on them. What i would like to do is be able to put them into my a1200 and create disk "images" of them so they can be transferred to my pc and be used with winuae. The only experience i had with making floppy images on my amiga was dms, but i dont remember how to get that working. Can anyone recommend a good solution for this?

Thanks

[amigadave]

buy a PCMIA to CompactFlash adapter from AmigaKit as it comes with the software to create the adf images and import them to the CompactFlash card.  It is sooooo simple and easy to use.  Now all I have to do is find an easy way to handle the copy protected floppy disks to an adf image.

You won't regret the package from AmigaKit.

(of course you need a compactflash reader on your PC)

[actung_bab]

l know what you mean most the floppy discs l got recently all seem to have errors on them . never did have much luck with them . seems u can get adf writing programs on the aminet.

dms is program u place in your c: dir then l used to have it set up in dopus to write and other commands to extract.

sure other people know more than me.

l thought be cool to make up cdrom with your own software.

just havent got around to it . :-)

[actung_bab]

yes that program does look cool l plan to get it when l order

0s 4.0

l have the ide 2 1/2 cf reader adaptor l brought of ebay.

on cost 1 us dollar. :-)

[orange]

usage of dms is simple: DMS read filename.dms


if you get read errors, I'd suggest copying problem diskette to new one using X-Copy or similar, it has option of trying to read many times same track and that can help esp. in case of AmigaDOS floppies. (also try with different FDD)

[spirantho]

One thing, though - you can't make images of copy-protected disks. There's not enough information in the ADF file format. For copy protected disks you need all sorts of extra things - not necessarily to read but to write them back.

There's a project going on called the SPS (formerly CAPS) at http://www.softpres.org/ for the preservation of game disks.

When it comes to your own game disks, though, I'm afraid there's not much you can do, unless they happen to be non-copy-protected (i.e. AmigaDOS games like Robosport or hacked games).

[Techx]

Actually that is exactly how I was able to save all of my 245MB amiga harddrive files. I had a 256MB CF card and bought the pcmcia CF card reader for $10 and it worked like a charm! I would prefer not to purchase separate software just to convert the floppies to adf. I guess I'll look around for a freeware utility that can do that.

Thanks again.

[Donar]

I use adfblitzer it is really easy, even i can use it. :lol:

[Nlandas]

Techx wrote:
Actually that is exactly how I was able to save all of my 245MB amiga harddrive files. I had a 256MB CF card and bought the pcmcia CF card reader for $10 and it worked like a charm! I would prefer not to purchase separate software just to convert the floppies to adf. I guess I'll look around for a freeware utility that can do that.

Thanks again.

There are multiple free programs that will let you create ADF files from non-protected disks.

Check Aminet - Aminet ADF Search

Once you've created the ADF file to RAM or Hard Drive then you can LHA it and use Crossdos/fat95 to copy it to a 720K PC formatted disk. Then copy the file off the disk onto a PC and build your collection. Once done burn them all to several CDROMs. Now if they'd just figure out how to crack all those old games that copyrights have expired on that'd be amazing.

I hope that helps.

-Nyle

P.S. I just read up on the SPS to see what they do. They'll send you specialized imaging software if your Amiga can handle it. Then the software will make a special image of your floppy and you send the images to SPS. They'll analyze them and see if they can create an IPF for you. If they can, they'll send you back an IPF that preserves everything, including the copy protection. Sound like a neat project.

[A1260]

if you have personal stuff like deluxe paint iff pictures, soundtracker mods etc backup that.. pirated games and applications you can just forget!... everything of that you can download as adf allready from p2p...

i guess the collection shrunk to only 10 floppys now HAHAHAHA!  :lol:

[Techx]

haha good one, but I do not use any p2p apps and haven't for many many years so I don't know the first place to find amiga games, demos, etc from. Not that I'm asking that question here, just stating a fact. Thanks for all the help though everyone, good stuff

[DigitalQ]

I'm in a similar boat; my plan involves using CrossDOS to mount PC-formatted iomega Zip disks with my SCSI zip drive, and storing the files that way; I should be able to get at least 100 floppies worth on one disk.  From there, once I have five or six disks full, I can take them to my PC and burn them onto a CD-ROM.  At that point, I won't need the crusty 3.5" floppy disks anymore.