IMWIN

an INTERmedia product, is to the best of our knowledge the only more-or-less general media-conversion tool presently available (otherwise we wouldn't sell it…)

Ideally, the goal is to be able to handle all disk and tape formats, including QIC80, Travan, Flopticals, …

At present, IMWIN support the following disk drives / densities:

3" Amstrad (drives are in short supply)
3.5" DD (720K)
3.5" HD (1.44M)
5.25" DD (180/360K)
5.25" 100 tpi (short supply)
5.25" HD (1.2M)
8" (251K > 1.1M)
hard sectored disks (8", 5.25", read only)
optical discs
CD's

SCSI drives supported, including the following:

DC600 (Tandberg) from QIC-20 and upwards;
Exabyte from 2 GB and upwards;
DAT (HP, Sony);
Magtape (Qualstar, Cipher, M4, Anacomp,…) from 800 bpi to 6250 bpi;
3480/3490 (Qualstar, Fujitsu, Anacomp, …) from 200 MB and upwards;
TK/DLT (Digital, Anacomp, …);
Ecrix;
AIT;

Which specific drive to use, depends on which densities you want to be able to read and/or write. Eventually, you might therefore be forced to buy multiple drives of the same (cartridge)type, as especially the write compatibility between drives of a family leaves much to be desired. Generally, when writing, a drive is 2 generations "backward compatible", and 4-5 generations when reading.

More or less complete list of the formats supported, is available here for tapes and here for disks.

Now, reading a media physically is only part of the "fun".

There are myriads of data formats available, which are incompatible with each other (or even with themselves, depending on the software release). SYTOS formats are different from ARC/Solo formats, which in turn differ from AS/400 Backup, etc. etc.

In short, handlers have been written for many data formats, and many more will surface, depending on the availability of information enabling the decoding of the physical files. Understandably, software vendors are very reluctant to release their trade secrets to the public domain.

Even when a format handler has done its job, more things need to be done, e.g. converting variable length EBCDIC records to fixed length ASCII CSV format, unpacking Cobol COMP-3 fields, date conversions, etc.

This can be accomplished with a combination of translation tables and protocols.

Optionally, IMWIN can be expanded with 2 highly specialized protocols: Record Reformatter and Validator.

IMWIN therefore, is the ideal tool to read/write "non standard" media in non-standard formats, without having to buy lots of different software packages.

A detailed technical specification of IMWIN, and some application notes.

One word of caution should be uttered: even INTERMedia has to give up sometimes. The main reason is that the information needed to decode (especially) back-up formats is hard to obtain, especially from some companies specialising in backup software.