Date   : Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:04:02 +0100
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Transferring hundreds of floppies to a PC

Gary Partis wrote:
> I have a large collection of floppies (source code, documents etc) from my
> old BBC days I wish to transfer to a PC.

Make sure you keep cleaning drive heads every few disks - depending on 
the quality of the disks you may find they're shedding coating pretty 
badly and the heads will get fouled rather quick. Best to know where to 
get a spare drive from in advance too!

I destroyed a drive in my 380Z doing a backup run a few months ago, and 
that was with a lot of head cleaning. One particular disk shed all of 
its coating onto one of the drive heads and then ripped the head clean 
out of the drive :(

> What is the best format for making these images available? BeebEm disc
> images?

Hmmm, ideally you want something that'll describe where any unreadable 
spots were in the original disk I suppose (rather than padding with 
blanks or whatever).

Not sure whether BeebEm's preferred format does that or not, but it'd 
seem like a sensible choice otherwise as it's a popular format and 
unlikely to die out any time soon...

cheers

Jules