On Tue, 01 Oct 2013, Holger Granholm wrote to Mark Lewis:

 HG> My CP/M floppies from a Triumph Adler CP/M machine can not be read 
 HG> directly in a DOS environment but with the aid of a translation

ml>not even with appropriat config.sys entries specifying the sector 
ml>count and similar options? at one time, years ago, my floppy drive 
ml>was known by 4 or 5 drive letters... A was normal, B was my second
ml>floppy, C, D, E and maybe F were all A with different parameters for
ml>reading other disk formats...

 HG> I did never have the need to dig that deep. The translation 
 HG> program worked its magic.

yeah, we did this because it was cheaper than buying a translation program
and it was already built into the system... the thing is that many did not
document all settings... i happened to have found out about it in an old
Kaypro manual and it worked on all subsequent DOSes that i tried it on ;)

FWIW: at one time, a friend did purchase a translation program for this
task... they spent $150US or more on the software for the one-time job of
copying data from five disks... then they never even used the data they had
copied... they recreated it, more than once... i never did get a good
reason for having recreated it when i asked [shrug]

)\/(ark