Why do you want to know what cylinder my drive supports reading to?

One of the things the imaging software does is to find out what Cylinder a drive supports reading up to.

“If I imaged to cylinder 83 on a drive that only supported reading to 81, would it damage my drive?”

It is extremely unlikely that reading past a drives “maximum cylinder” would damage it. Indeed, game loaders do things far worse than that. However, we decided that we would be very careful with drives because it is still possible (however unlikely) that reading beyond what the drive is capable of may damage it.

There is another reason though. Take the situation where data is stored on cylinder 83 (possible, but stupid) and a drive only supported reading up to (say) cylinder 81, then all we would get is cylinder 81 being read for 82 and 83 (the head being “hard stopped” there).