thank you b On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 11:38 AM David Schmidt via cctalk < [email protected]> wrote:
> Following up: I published an update to this tool that helps make "bad" > rips more square. ImageDisk will create an IMD file that faithfully lacks > sectors that it can find no trace of. So reading marginal media that has > unreadable and unlocatable sectors will have a track that is perhaps > shorter than tracks that came before it because it's lacking unfindable > sectors. Worse than that, IMD will decide that's the new norm and stop > looking for that sector on later tracks as well (unless you have it analyze > every sector which is slow, but at least it improves fidelity in reading > marginal media). That's a different problem. For cases where you're > missing a sector here or there and the rest of the sectors are fine within > tracks, this new option to fill in missing sectors will help. > > Recall that the function of IMDU and this tool (imd2raw) is to take a rich > IMD image and linearize it into a raw image. That image really needs to be > square in order to have it make any sense because there's no metadata > anywhere to explain where or why a sector might be missing. So the only > reasonable thing to do in this situation is to pad out the missing sector > with zeros or xE5s so that subsequent tracks and sectors can be located > reliably with consistent offsets. The default behavior is still to be > exactly like IMDU was, but the optional –f or --fill-missing parameter will > make this change for the output image and indicate missing sectors with a > '0' in the graphical display. > > https://github.com/RetroFloppy/imd2raw >
