Vintage Sampler Floppy Disk Salvation

We interrupt these awesome basketball Dream posts to bring you your quarterly nerd report:

Having trouble backing up your Ensoniq EPS Classic (wiki) sound disks?

I was.

I've been using software called Omniflop which basically reads your non-pc formatted disks as raw as possible, then saves that as an 'image' onto a computer...which it can later use to recreate the floppy.

I ran into some problems with some EPS disks not wanting to read...hey, the most recent date on any of these 1989, so we can cut mother nature some slack in this case. Specifically, these disks WOULD load in the sampler, but would not load in my computer disk drive.

The solution:
Find a floppy that DOES load fine on your computer. This is going to be your 'transfer disk'.
Format your 'transfer disk' with your sampler. Make it fresh.
Take a 'problem disk', and load it into the sampler. Load the sounds as normal.
Now simply save the files onto your freshly formatted 'transfer disk'. If you could read the disk before, you can likely read it again, albeit this time with new data on it.

So it's a lot of insert disk, load, eject disk, insert xfer disk, save, eject disk, insert into pc, backup disk...over and over (more depending on your sampler, maybe)...but it is a way to salvage your material!

I will be posting soon about my experience into installing an HxC SD Floppy Emulator into this same EPS, so I don't have to go through this failing disk / drive nonsense again.

You may now return to higher caliber journalism.

-j

BONUS POINTS: Save an image file of the formatted disk, and instead of formatting in the sampler later, simply load the formatted image via the PC.