Best practice for reading 800k Mac disks and converting to disk image files?

[wilhelmloof]

What is best practice for reading 800k Mac floppy disks and converting them to disk image files?

I've been reading the disks with this command:

gw read disk-00.0.raw

And converting the raw flux data to a binary disk image file like this:

gw convert --format mac.800 disk-00.0.raw disk.img

Or reading directly to a disk image:

gw read --format mac.800 disk.img

There are several other switches/arguments available under gw read --help, and I wonder if there are some other arguments that can be useful for reading or converting, in order to make an img-file as good as possible?

Is there any benefit adding --format mac.800 also when reading raw data?

What's a recommended method for exporting all files in an img-file on macOS/bash?

[keirf]

If you add --format mac.800 when reading raw, then by default the "raw" image will actually contain re-created tracks after being passed through the Greaseweazle Mac GCR codec. You probably don't want that! However if you also add --raw then you will get the benefit of track verification against the mac.800 format while still writing out the raw flux direct from disk.

[keirf]

Beyond that, not really much to say. I try to design the command line to work well without needing lots of options.

[wilhelmloof]

Thanks for clarifying.

So, if I understand you correctly, the command for track verification while still writing raw flux data would be:

gw read --format mac.800 --raw disk-00.0.raw

And the written flux data with the command above will be the same the plain command:

gw read disk-00.0.raw

When is verification useful? Do you often read disks with verification? What happens if there are format errors while verifying, will gw still write raw flux data?

[keirf]

The verification will give you immediate feedback on the quality of your dump, and gw will automatically read more revolutions of a track on verification failure.

You could equally not bother, and try a gw convert or similar straight after the plain raw dump.