Attempting to Repair Bad Sectors on Damaged Floppy Disks in MS-DOS
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- Опубліковано 7 сер 2024
- A quick demo / tutorial on the basics of recovering data from damaged floppy disks. I use Norton Disk Doctor 8.0 for MS-DOS. Scandisk, and VGA Copy/386 to look at a few bad 3.5" 1.44mb floppy disks and attempt to recover some of the data.
Video recorded from a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 CDT running MS-DOS 6.22 via the VGA connector.
VGA Copy is particularly useful when bad sectors cannot be repaired. VGA Copy 6.25 can be downloaded from Archive.org: archive.org/details/vgacp625 - Ігри
I used VGAcopy so much in the nineties.
I used to have to do this for a job with to recover special customer information off of SD Cards (2MB). I used an embedded solution to access the SD card at a device level which was lower than the file access level and get a full image. I would then use a tool I wrote in Python that would examine the entire device image, make assumptions and recover the data and generate a report of the valid data, recovered data, overwritten data and what I technically called "ify" data. Perhaps something like that would work for recovering Floppy Disks.
So in terms of scanning the errors themselves, Microsoft Scandisk is just as good as NDD?
Btw the description link appears to be down
This is the video I need! Thank you for this video.
I meant to reply to this weeks ago, but my health took a bit of a turn. Thank you for the comment - I know it doesn't seem like much but it really put a smile on my face at a time when it was definitely needed. Let me know how it went. I forgot to mention in the video that sometimes a different drive can make a world of difference if you're desperately trying to recover a specific disk.
@@nanonomad it worked for some of the disks. Ultimately they're very cheap 720k disks with untold storage history. I was running this on my laptop but was gonna try using my desktop instead if that might be a bit more reliable. But for the odd disk where it had a sector issue this worked!
My 1986 Toshiba t3100e/40 is very unpredictable. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes it just throws this code, sometimes it boots dos then refuses to even dir on the a drive. Huh. It is on its second floppy drive, which is a really niche and not normal drive so it's worse
I have a clone of that system or similar sitting in a box - can't get it going. Pretty sure one of the voltage regulators on my power module went bad. What code were you getting?
Have you tried physically cleaning the read head on that first drive that went out? I wouldnt suggest doing it on the working drive, but I've resurrected a handful of floppy units just by removing decades of cigarette tar and dust bunnies
It might be worth grabbing one of the ancient RAM test utilities as well. Off the top of my head I cant think of one that will run on that, but I know there's something. I've used it. lol. Evidently need to run it on my brain, too. Its possible that while trying to buffer the contents of the drive its flipping some bits and causing random errors.
The download link is broken.