[vcf-midatlantic] Media Operation- was "Recovering Macintosh floppies"

[Douglas Crawford]

Hey folks-

I'm sorry I dumped on the group about my frustrations
with media recovery/imaging.  I also inadvertently hi-jacked
Jeff's original post though it was related, I realize
now I was trumping his simple request with the general
case of media.  But if we had what I'm asking for
here, he would not have had the need to ask for this
specific solution.

Its been a year and a half
that I wanted the museum to be able to create and
recreate the diskette media we use in the museum at will.
Jeff has wanted this for years longer!
This would support the ongoing operation of the computers
on display and the games and applications that we
demonstrate on them, and let us add to the complement
at will. Lots of different machines.

By now I thought things had developed that one
system would be able to make any media we wanted,
and would surely have a simple GUI interface that
museum volunteers without a degree in magnetics.
I'm not talking about fancy data recovery-
just make disks from images from the web and
capture working diskettes we already have.

But it has been not forthcoming.
I used IMD in the past quite a bit, we now have grease weazel,
and an original Applesause.
IMD and greaseweazle can't do Apple, neither can
do TRS-80.  IMD only for DEC robin? Not sure.
C= 1541? I found no web use of GW & 1541.
So can it? Does it work? Don't know!
I have ways to hook up and use a real 1541 drive
But its yet another system of software.
We need to be able to select an image and put it to
a drive. Simple as that.

A month ago I tried Applesause to simply capture an Apple II
disk image and replicate it to a new floppy.
It worked with an Apple IIgs disk so I thought I was
good to go.  Then I did the same thing for an older Apple
DOS disk and after writing the image out, the disk
produced wouldn't read in the Apple II. I have to
go back over this, it could have been operator error
but whatever it was, it was subtle and frustrating.
And embarrassing because this was for a project and
the "clients" were present waiting to use this copy
that I had made from their original only existing copy.
I ended up copying the disk on our museum Apple II dual
disk system.

Right now the only way I know I can make
a TRS-80 disk today is on a DOS machine running the
TRS emulator which can mount real drives under the emulator.
Yet another system to set up and support in the museum?

I thought these new imaging systems would be a dream,
but I had a lot more success with the old IMD system.
They are all great developments, I'm not taking anything
away from them, but they weren't really conceived with
our use case. It seems they solve specific areas of media problems
that were of interest to their creators.

And then there are the larger needs of VCF is to provide
for mass archiving and restoring of media data.
Well in this operation, we can at least expect to
have more expertise by the people doing this work.

It all is quite complicated and I have a museum
to run and grow and I don't have time to work out
all the kinks and solve the science problem of the
minimum set of tools to cover at least what we
work with let alone cover all that we might encounter
as we restore warehouse items.

So that's the long story why I tire of just having
ideas tossed out on what we COULD do. Or "just do this"
responses from the sideline.

Hence my plea for help by those who like this sort of thing.
We really need a media team to set up, document, and maintain
a media operation arm of the mid-atlantic operation.
If I was doing nothing else I'd love to set it up.

-- 
Douglas Crawford
VCF Mid-Atlantic Museum Mgr
InfoAge Science & History Museums
2201 Marconi Road
Wall, NJ 07719