Need help, ST Disk has bad sector

[Peter Miller]

I've got a ST disk but when I use the Windows Floppy Disk Copy tutorial, it tells me there are 2 bad sectors on the disk. Is this disk useless or can I save it somehow?

[Mindfield]

Welcome to the wonderful world of bit rot. :-)

 

Unfortunately there's not much you can do. When disks started going bad on me, I'd try to make a backup by wiggling the disk in the drive, popping it out and in again, as it tried to read. Sometimes it would get it to read, sometimes it was an excersize in futility. It's about the only thing you can try before you consign the disk to the trash.

[sonnenhexer]

quote:

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Originally posted by Peter Miller:

I've got a ST disk but when I use the Windows Floppy Disk Copy tutorial, it tells me there are 2 bad sectors on the disk. Is this disk useless or can I save it somehow?

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Hi,

 

it depends on the disk/game. Some games from FTL (Sundog, Dungeon Master) use bad sectors as a part of copy protection (as far as I remember), so maybe this is ok.

 

Michael

[Silver Surfer]

If you still own an atari st I would suggest that you try to copy it with some copy program or just copy the files onto a empty disk, you just might get lucky!

[t.skid]

quote:

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Originally posted by Mindfield:

Unfortunately there's not much you can do. When disks started going bad on me, I'd try to make a backup by wiggling the disk in the drive, popping it out and in again, as it tried to read. Sometimes it would get it to read, sometimes it was an excersize in futility.

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I see that with this problem we use the same way

[Mindfield]

Heh... it's a holdover from my 8-bit days, where bitrot was an even worse problem, since it was a lot easier for 5.25" floppies to die. 5.25" floppies had more give to them though, so it was a lot easier to pinch the disk and wiggle it round to try and get the drive to read it. It didn't work quite as well on the ST with the 3.5" floppies having that hard shell and all, but it saved a few of my floppies from taking all its data with it to the bitbucket. :-)