catweasel method vs. amiga cd burner method of floppy archiving

[weirdami]

Would it be better to connect a CD burner (internal type from an old IBM) to my A1200 somehow and burn CD's that way, or would it be better to get one of them catweasel deals and hook it up to an IBM and burn CD's from the IBM? My A1200's HD is around 100 megs, so unless Amiga CD burning softwares do multiple sessions, I'll be making 100 meg CD's.

What I want to do is to get the stuff from all of my floppy disks onto CD before the disks die. If I run into some disks that need to be DiskSalved, am I right in thinking that the catweasel does DS type functions, or was that something else they were talking about at the last amiwest's panel discussion and banquet?

[KennyR]

The PC+CDR option sounds better. Less wasteful.

The catweasel itself doesn't do disksalving. This is where it gets complicated. You make an ADF of the bad disk, use UAE and run disksalv on it, then save the fixed ADF.

Or you could just use disksalv on the Amiga, save the files to another floppy, and make an ADF with that on the PC catweasel.

[weirdami]

@kennyr

So, when Jens (that's the name I remember) was giving his long techy speech at amiwest about getting data from all kinds of disks, what he meant was just getting at the data, not doing any kind of processing on the data?

It sounds kinda weird that DiskSalv would be able to work on just a pretend disk. Is the catweasel as good as, or better than, DS at figuring out what data really was supposed to be on those bad parts of the disk (without worrying why it's there like DS does, I imagine)? I remember DS making all kinds of noise on the floppy drive when bad data was encountered. I've spent hours and hours waiting for it to stop gronking and get me my data. :-)

So I take it that DS on UAE on a pretend floppy would take no time at all, right? Have you had success doing DS on UAE on pretend disks?

[KennyR]

I have a Catweasel Mk.3 PCI plugged into my Pegasos currently, and it's just like using an Amiga floppy disk drive - I don't need to make ADFs or any of that. But the Windows version isn't quite like that, as far as I know. At least it wasn't; maybe that has changed. Certainly the Mk.2 could only make ADF - but this is very old now. I'm sorry I don't know more. A lot of people will know more than me if it's possible to use a catweasel directly from Windows/UAE like an old floppy drive.

Here is the problem with making ADF - the drive only 'lifts' what it can from the disk. If there are hardware errors it will simply read what it can - or fail completely.  I think the way disksalv saves files from bad disks is that it reads them again and again and again until it gets a good checksum. A catweasel won't do this when it ADFs a disk (although it has better error recovery than an old Amiga drive). This could be a problem if you have many bad disks...

It sounds kinda weird that DiskSalv would be able to work on just a pretend disk.

Disksalv doesn't know it's a pretend disk - it just does its job.

So I take it that DS on UAE on a pretend floppy would take no time at all, right? Have you had success doing DS on UAE on pretend disks?

It's very, very quick. I've used it on ADF and FMSDisk images (a sort of ADF-like 'fake' floppy), ram disks, and such. But since these never really have hardware errors, only undelete, validate, and unformat are useful.

[desborough]

Does anyone know where I can get a Catweasel Mk.3 in the UK? I cant seem to find them anywhere.

[reflect]

contact stellardreams, they ought to be able to get it for you.

[weirdami]

Hey, speaking about DiskSalv, is it freeware now? There's a version 11.?? on aminet and some kind of patch files for version 3 (that patch version 12 for some reason?). What's the current version of DiskSalv?

[KennyR]

You can get Disksalv 2 from Aminet. DiskSalv 3 is commercial and can only be bought - but who from these days, I have no idea.