Mapping unreadable disks

[moonlight_mile]

Hey guys,

Want to give a special shout out to The Doctor for really helping me get back up to speed, along with asking a lot of

Questions.

 

Now, I have a few disks that I think are from my old bbs. I really am trying to at least see what is on them. I got a Percom (low and behold I recently realized I had an rfd44 and not an at-88) it won't read the disks. (It will read two other disks from the same set I found with some type of music files). I did have bill Lange try them on his 1050, which I think he said were double density. But didn't work.

 

Is there a program that can manually map a disc sector by sector and track by track even if the drive doesn't want to read it? I am figuring if I can find out what is in the directory it will determine if it is worth my while to pursue archiving the disks?

 

Obviously, I tried disk wizard II but since it won't read the disk it doesn't show me anything.

 

Any help appreciated.

-craig

[R.Cade]

This is probably something where you'd want to image them with a Kryoflux and find someone experienced to see if they can figure out what it is you have...

[SignGuy81]

I've had success before with 3.5" floppies by sliding the door back on them and shooting them on both sides with compressed air(just not holding the tube very close). And also(even though it read the other disks) spray inside the disk drive too. Then try again.

[Rybags]

If the disk won't read then it won't read, and a utility program won't have much advantage over Dos. There might be the chance that the directory area has gone bad since it gets accessed a lot.

A disk utility program could do direct sector read, I'd suggest something like try sectors 1, 30, 54 which are on tracks 0, 1, 2 on both standard and ED disks.

 

Before even going to the deeper testing you should try giving it a manual head clean with the cover off the drive. Then try formatting and reading/writing to a blank disk to ensure the drive is at least funtional.

[SignGuy81]

I didn't read this but it may help https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178483/how-to-recover-floppy-disc-files

[Rybags]

It's not real helpful. It's data recovery the sense of getting it back in place, those linked articles are just really generic and not even much help for old PC stuff.

 

Other things - check the floppies themselves. Slightly prize the jacket off where the slot is and check the tissue paper for depostion of oxide, inspect the disk surface for signs of scratches and wear. Turn it by hand, there shouldn't be too much resistance.

 

One real helpful thing though is to know that the drive itself isn't at fault, the best way there is for it to be able to read/write commercial disks, disks created on other drives.

Edited May 27, 2017 by Rybags

[Rybags]

Here's a quick & dirty Basic program you can type in to do a quick read check on a floppy. DOS doesn't need to be present. It checks several tracks, when you run it, it asks for S or E to indicate Single or Enhanced density disk, that only changes the step between read attempts so to hit the first sector on each track.

 

 

10 GOSUB 1000
20 GRAPHICS 0:? "DENSITY (S/E) ";:INPUT D$:S=18:IF D$="E" THEN S=26
30 FOR SEC=1 TO 120 STEP S
40 POKE 769,1:POKE 770,82:POKE 772,128:POKE 773,6
50 Z=USR(1536,SEC) "SECTOR ";SEC;" STATUS ";Z
60 NEXT SEC
999 STOP
1000 TRAP 1010:FOR A=1536 TO 1560:READ D:POKE A,D:NEXT A
1010 DIM D$(1)
1020 RETURN
1100 DATA 104,104,141,11,3,104,141,10,3,32,83,228,132,212,169,0,133,213,96,-1

[_The Doctor__]

His best bet is a drive and controller that can handle percom quad disks...

 

Next Best is Kryo-flux or SCP used with a capable drive... then the data could be turned into an ATR using A8RAWCON.. then you can mount the image into APE or Respeqt and pull what you want off and re-save it to whatever disk you like..

 

that is if a8rawcon can make 720k or 1.2m, 1.4m ATR disks... because that's what the percom quads basically formatted out to with depending on the mech used and whether it was a 8, 5.25 or 3.5 inch.. drive..... since he tried with 1050... that's 5.35 and his drive was 5.35 back in the day and is more than likely going to be 360, 720, or 1.2m

 

The next move would be Black Box with floppy board and a quad mech.....

 

after that an ATR 8000 with quad mech.... and the needed build of DOS to access it...

 

My offer to try with an XF551 still stands... side 2 of the drive would have to be written in reverse though sector by sector what a pain that would be!

Edited May 27, 2017 by _The Doctor__

[SignGuy81]

Yeah I realize that now, I just seen data recovery and floppy and didn't see the whole title

[moonlight_mile]

Thanks for all the info. Those little adapters are really cool and if I had a lot of disks to archive I would definitely get one of those little devices.

 

Doc yes I will probably take you up on your offer just seeing what I can accomplish on my own.

 

I am getting the sio2pc (hopefully soon). I am hoping to get it to play nice with my Percom. Will the aspeqt app let me read those disks into the pc or is that strictly only with the APE Pro-system?