Easy to read the disks (Score 1)

You can hook the 1541 up directly to the PC if you have a cable. I made such a cable for the Amiga and even wrote a program for it to read whole disks block by block off the 1541. (I actually reverse engineered the disk routines in the C64 ROM to do it.) There are several programs to do this on the PC, and the cable schematics should be easily available.