Hi,
On Sat, 17 Apr 1999 Ethan Dicks wrote:
I am attempting to back up some floppies from a
project I did a few years
ago. The sets of 3.5" 1.44Mb IBM floppies have been stored in a box, in a
cool and dry room. Out of one set of 12 and one set of 15 disks, I have four
disks that have read errors that DOS won't get past, bad sectors and the
like.
...
Are there any tools to go divining on DOS floppies that work better than
an endless succession of "R"etries? It's an all or nothing prospect; the
first disk has the install file, the remaning disks have a chopped monolithic
data file. If one disk can't be read, the whole set is fundamentally
useless.
First, I take it you have tried reading the disks on different drives? If that
didn't help, using the fdread package *might*, but I doubt it.
You have an Amiga right? One possible solution, if you want to spend some time
on this, would be to write a program to read the raw data from the disk, then
MFM-decode and analyse the data and report/correct any errors. This could work
if the only problems are with sector headers. Or try creating disk images
using one of the various Amiga PC-disk-access packages, maybe one of those is
more forgiving? (CrossDOS, XFS, MultiDOS, etc.)
(Aside: since the Amiga disk controller is so versatile, it should be possible
to archive "all" copy-protected PC disks using a program such as MFMWarp.)
-- Mark