Legacy Binary File Editor

Jerome H. Fine [jhfinedp3k at compsys.to] wrote: I'm pretty sure I didn't say "repair"; I merely recovered data. I don't recall exactly what went wrong, but essentially I went in with TECO and found the right blocks for the various source files I needed, loaded them into TECO and wrote them out to floppy. Needed some minor tidy up as I recall but that's about all. I didn't have to recover that much, just a few days worth or changes since the last backup (after that I backed up twice a day :-)). I didn't fix a corrupt system back to a working system. I read blocks from disk into TECO (as you say, in a non-file structured mode), somehow found the root directory and worked out where the files I cared about lived, read each of those and saved them to floppy. Then either the disk was reformatted or it went back to whoever we bought it from for a replacement- I just don't remember. That said, I'm not sure - in principle - why I could not have found the hosed bits, fixed them and written out new raw blocks (other than wanting to finish my D.Phil. in finite time, of course :-)). TECO can certainly read disk block N, and having done that it can surely mangle that disk block; what I'm not sure of is whether it can then write that block out to the required disk block. I if no-one knows for sure, then someone needs to fire up SIMH? (I do have at least one (micro)PDP-11 handy[*] but on this occasion I think the whole "read/edit/blast-that-wasn't-quite-right" cycle is going to be a lot quicker on a virtual system ...). Antonio [*] My current definition of "handy" is: sitting in the garage and needing time to warm up before powering on since it's been a couple of months and actually I'll probably have to find where I put that console lead and I wonder where the OS disks are because it went into the garage without one. YDMV, of course :-)