In article 20130607065100.GE21697@gjcp.net, wrote:
... and what'll really blow your mind is that there are disk formats out there where the
sectors aren't even all the same size along the track (hello, Ensoniq Mirage/SQ80) - and fdutils handles that just fine thanks ;-)
Back in the late 80s, some folks gave me a call and asked if I could help get data off a floppy for them. It seems they'd bounced around from expert to expert, including a disk duplication specialist, but no-one could read it.
As I did a lot of floppy protection (and cracking, two hats!) I agree to take a look.
Even just hitting the PC BIOS with a selection of sector numbers and sizes was enough to show that nothing special was going on other than four different sector sizes per track so the job was done in minutes even when coding the copy code in x86 assembler.
BTW, this was totally legit as they were porting a game from an arcade machine and just needed the graphics, and the cracking I was doing was to make game compilations where the publishers has lost the unprotected masters.