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Software to create disk images?

D

Drken

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 13, 2009
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306
Location
Charlotte NC
I am wondering what the usership here feels are the best utilities to create disk images. I prefer the .DSK format, but am open to other formats.
 
A while ago I tested a whole bunch of them and finally decided to use firm. It's only 14k and a command to restore looks like this. (Or use -w to write.)
Code: 
firm floppy.img a: -r
FIRM.COM is a simple to use DOS Floppy image reader/maker. It is compatible with files used by many other disk image reader/writers. It is capable of reading/writing disks of other systems, Unix, Linux, later Mac and some other disks. Image files can be written back to disks of a larger capacity than the original for at least FAT systems! Say a 1.2MB floppy is saved to an image file and the user wishes to restore to a 1.44MB, the image file would be written back correctly for at least DOS systems.

To read or write a floppy image FIRM requires three parameters, the drive to read or write the image to or from, the file to create or write back and and finally the operation to perform either read or write.
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It's simple, small, and effective.

Edit: I didn't notice the "Early Apple" in the path. My suggestion is for DOS. Sorry!
 
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Drken said:
I am wondering what the usership here feels are the best utilities to create disk images.
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There are quite a few out there. It kind of depends on what you want to do:
  • ADT - great for creating and transferring plain old DOS/ProDOS disk images in 143k .DSK, .do or .po format
  • ADTPro - superset of ADT capabilities, extends into arbitrary disk sizes and more communications methods
  • Asimov - Create and extract disk images of arbitrary disk sizes; uses local storage, so you create/extract and store locally on the Apple
  • DiskMaker 8 - Makes physical disks out of locally-stored disk images

Drken said:
I prefer the .DSK format, but am open to other formats.
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I'm not sure I understand that part of the question. Current emulators all understand .DSK (which is not quite a standard, but generally refers to either DOS-ordered or ProDOS-ordered 143k disks (more precisely named .do or .po)). There is a format that can imprecisely capture some copy protection information from 143k disks called .nib which is generally supported by emulators as well. Creating disks of this type is a bit labor-intensive, as you can tell from the how-to guide.

There are a few other formats out there, like .2img, .po, and .hdv that support much larger sizes and can emulate hard drives. But you don't really have an awful lot of latitude for 'personal preferences' - formats you use are largely dictated by the emulation or transfer software you're interested in using.

magnusfalkirk said:
In my opinion ADTPro is THE BEST software for transferring disk images to/from the Apple II and Mac/PC. You can download the latest version of it from here: http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/
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Thanks for the plug. I like it too, but I'm biased. ;-)
 
david__schmidt said:
Thanks for the plug. I like it too, but I'm biased. ;-)
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David,

Yeah I'm kind of biased also, since your program was the first one I found shortly after I got back into the Apple II. I've watched as you've improved it over the years and made it better and better. Keep up the good work.

Dean
 
Thanks for all the responses! I did not realize that ADTPro will create disk images from the disks - I was under the wrong impression that it just transferred files from PC <---> Apple II. And since I have been using CiderPress to transfer disk images via a CF card, I haven't had any reason to look more closely at ADTPro until now... so thanks for pointing me in the right direction! Especially now that I can't get CiderPress to work with my Windows 7 machines and there is no CiderPress support that I can find.

I have absolutely no interest in emulators. I'm one of those biased folks who think that if you want to experience the Apple II, you use an Apple II. My interest in creating compressed disk images is archival in nature - want to be able to archive & transfer sans floppies.
 
Drken said:
... Especially now that I can't get CiderPress to work with my Windows 7 machines and there is no CiderPress support that I can find.
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You really should be posting CP questions over on comp.sys.apple2. The author of CiderPress, Andy McFadden, is there from time to time. But he's not running Windows 7, so keep that in mind...
 
Drken said:
CiderPress page directs questions & bug reports to the SourceForge page so I assumed that was the route to go.
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Sure, it says that. You might also note that there has only ever been one bug report opened, back in 2007, and it hasn't been touched. :) Your audience is much, much larger on c.s.a2.
 
I'll give it a try. BTW, what on Earth is SourceForge anyway? Seems to be a black hole in which to throw things, never to be seen or heard from again!
 
SourceForge is a site that hosts open source programs and their authors. I host ADTPro there, for example. I also have contributed in my own small way to CiderPress - I wanted it to understand Apple /// Business BASIC, so I wrote that code and sent it back to the project. So you, for example, can download the source code to CiderPress and explore a solution all on your own. You can then contribute the source back to the project so that others might beneift from it. It's one manifestation of the Open Source movement: if you can use the software, great. If it doesn't work for you, you can change it so it does. Or not. And contribute back to the community. Or not. It's all up to you!

I saw your posting on c.s.a2 - you're running 64 bit Windows 7, aren't you? I have a sneaking suspicion that's what's wrong, but I have no way of testing that theory.
 
It does work with the IIe card -- that's how I make images of Apple II 5.25" disks nowadays. Of course, you can also write disk images out to a ProDOS hard disk partition, and copy them from Mac OS.
 
That'd be even easier. Awesome. :)

I have all my old games I want to copy. I know the Asimov archive is pretty extensive, but it seems more gratifying if I do it myself. :p
 
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