Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux... 8-inch disks with bad blocks.

On Thursday 02 May 2002 18:54, you wrote: In dos you could do that with a batfile script of looping debug commands ie read sector > mem write sector mem > another disk when you are done with a floppy you would have all the readable sectors on a new floppy or whatever with the bad ones left containing whatever bits it could get if any along with the prev sectors data You could at least spool the new disk to a file and worry over the missing bits.. Ive done this before with bad PC floppies that could not be mounted in any way, ie trashed unreadble block 0, alien file system etc. I suppose you could hack fdformat ( the verify code etc ) into a very respectable floppy recovery tool that would give you all the good sectors to a file with the nonreadble sectors filled with zeros.. one scheme perhaps .. have your set of "tools" write a empty recovery file preinit with zeroed blocks (easy to do with dd) and then write only good reads into their respective positions, that way in the attempt to get a good read of bad sectors .. bad reads of once good sectors wont trash good data you managed to get already Hey .. its an idea. there is lots of "getsector" code out there burried in a lot of things that you could wrap your own code around .. you might not even wrap it with much ... The following is only a simulation #getsector --help Usage: getsector -d device -s relative_sector fill in the rest with shell scripting ... wouldnt be fast but simple brute force is often better Isnt there a readtrack command on some controllers ? You could come at this from a few angles i suppose. Raymond