It is a very sad thing that you encount a disk-read-error for a floopy disk that have not been used for a while. Or you find that it is very hard for you to keep your useful floopy disks organized. Here I introduce a way to safely-keep, duplicate your floopy disks.
In UNIX, there is a command called "dd". You can find its equivalent "dd.exe" for Windows in Windows-MKS-Kit or it can be downloaded from "http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/%7Ejn/linux/rawwrite.htm".
To create a image of a 1.2M floopy disk to hard disk, insert the disk to A:, and under MS-DOS command prompt:
dd.exe if=\\.\a: of=c:\temp\disk1.img bs=1440k
This will save the image of the floopy disk to "disk1.img".
When you need the disk, insert a blank disk to A:, recreate the disk by:
dd.exe if=c:\temp\disk1.img of=\\.\a: bs=1440k
I have tested the method on Windows-NT, Windows-2000.