23 Oct
2012
23 Oct
'12
5:22 p.m.
On 10/23/2012 4:30 PM, Colin Eby wrote:
Josh,
My apologies! I got tangled up with other things and dropped the ball. Do nag me if I
seem to go away.
Oh, no problem. I'm not in any hurry here :).
Software -- I'm afraid the PERQ software is in the end of the archive they are still
cataloguing. So I tried my luck a bit. I came across a games disk which appeared to have
a copy of an asteroid clone on it, but the disk didn't appear to be readable.
I've imaged it, but the system threw every kind of data error when attempting to read
it. Attempting to execute the file I *did* managed to extract hung the PERQ up good and
proper. I'm reasonably confident the drive is reading well and this is genuinely a
diskette issue.
I think Al may have mentioned this, but the first track of PERQ floppies
is left unformatted (or if it is formatted, it wasn't the PERQ that did
it.) I don't know why this is, but keep it in mind when archiving
them. Sounds like that's probably not the issue here, though.
Hopefully some of your disks do end up being salvageable.
I've also imaged a set of POS based utilities, but all those disks appeared quite
badly damaged (one of them was actually clear in sections). I don't think much will
come from a forensic examination of the raw image. But by happenstance, we have two
copies of that set, and I've not tried the second set yet (about 8 diskettes).
Depending on cirqs this weekend I might get an hour or two to slave over a hot PERQ
backing off files and validating media. Nag me again Sunday, if I fail to report back!
Best of luck :). If you want to image your PERQ's hard disk, I can send
you an image containing a bootable POS + my dumpdisk utility. Given a
few hours it'll send the contents of the disk over the RS232 port.
Thanks again,
- Josh