[Techtoolslist] Fluke 9100 Service Kit 818948?

[Ian Eure]

John Robertson writes:

> On 2018/08/10 8:51 PM, Ian Eure wrote:
>> teeray writes:
>>
>>> Kryoflux stream format is not the standard.  How would people without a Kryoflux board
>>> write the disk image ?
>>>
>> Recent SamDisk can convert Kryoflux Stream images to its own format,
>> or ImageDisk, and you can write those.  There’s an example in the
>> README in the archive.
>>
>>
>>> All you need is a raw dump of the disk.
>>>
>>> Then everyone can write the image to a disk.
>>>
>> There is no "standard" format, which is one of the reasons why the
>> 9100 disk image situation is such mess.  This one is in TeleDisk
>> format and disk 3 seems to be bad, someone said this is good, but it’s
>> SAMDisk, and you need Windows to write that instead of DOS and blah
>> blah blah.  I wanted images which were absolutely known to be good or
>> bad, and clearly documented as such.
>>
>> Kryoflux is what I chose, because it’s designed for archival, and has
>> supporting features which other methods don’t.  It shows you if the
>> media has been modified by someone after it was pressed, so you know
>> if you’re actually getting the original disk or one keyed to a
>> specific machine’s serial number.  It doesn’t fail on bad sectors, it
>> dumps them and you can see exactly which were bad.  If you have
>> multiple damaged copies of the same disk, you can piece together a
>> complete, good image, sector by sector.
>>
>> The goals of my archive are to be as complete and consistent as
>> possible.  That means all images are the same format, and that format
>> is Kryoflux Stream.  And since it’s sampling the flux instead of
>> passing it through MFM decoding to create a bitstream, it’s the rawest
>> dump you can get. :)
>>
>>    -- Ian
> If Ian can archive good images using Kyroflux and the rest of us can 
> convert those images to other formats then we all win!
>
> Ian, what do you need to go forward? If you have a list of floppies you 
> either want images of or the physical disk I will help where I can. Much 
> like the archiving of the 9010 tapes, this needs to be done sooner 
> rather than later as floppies are failing due to age...
>
I personally tend to overkill, so I’d like to get ahold of as
many disks as possible, even if they’re ones I already have copies
of.  You never know if you’ll find something a little different, and
there’s no way to know but to check.  I’m happy to pay shipping, and
if you’d like duplicates to use as working copies, I’ll make some and
include them when I return the originals.  Anything I image gets put
in the archive so everyone can benefit.

My personal wish is for:

 - More service disks.  Even if they’ve been used, the Kryoflux will
   show what sectors were modified to hold the machine’s serial
   number.  This could be valuable to better understand how this
   process works.
 - Any 9100 disks versions 1.x-3.x and 5.x.  The 4.x stuff seems to be
   the most common, and 6.0 / 6.1 have been circulated a fair amount
   as well.  While these aren’t useful for using the 9100s today, I’m
   interested in preserving anything I can, and that’s a big gap.

 -- Ian