I have featured this disk previously
Scuse the blurred shot but recording
Who's that girl?
ScuzzBlog: Diaries December 2024
Entry 15th December 2024: Post 1: Amiga - Disk Salvage.
Amiga - Disk Salvage.
One subject that crops up over and over again is the issue of
old and damaged disks. Thing is nine times out of ten there is
very little, if anything, wrong with the disk and as long as you
are careful in the way you try to salvage the data you should
be able to create a working copy, with very little effort.
First up it is important to appreciate that the head on your
floppy drive needs to be cleaned regularly when dealing with old
disks. It really is amazing at how quickly drives become dirty.
The best cleaners are the simple disk cleaning kits that place
a small drop of cleaning fluid onto a special cleaning disk.
The next item that helps a ton is an external disk drive. Two
drives is always better than one, and if you could find a HD
drive that can read high density disks you would be onto a
winner.
A good file manager is essential such as DOpus. The process of
salvage requires you to copy the contents of the disk to RAM and
then simply keep retrying to copy the files that register zero or
an incorrect byte number to the original. By simply flexing the
disk, tapping it on the desk or better playing in another drive
will often cause the disk to jump back into action and retrieve
that failing file. Eventually you can rebuild the whole disk and
copy to a fresh floppy and create an ADF file image for security.
Additionally it may be possible to track down a faulty file if
it is part of the Amiga main Workbench family. The file can then
be used with the damaged contents of the disk. Sometimes it can
take a while to rebuild disks and so keeping the work in progress
stored on a hard drive is really useful.
I never give up with disks. I will also track down versions on the
internet to replace the one I have.
It is important to note that every bit of an old disk has value.
The contents of a disk are built from the bones of the Amiga WB
and so keeping copies of files, in their respective drawers will
build up a resource on your hard drive that you can use to rebuild
other disks. Additionally , disks can have very useful utilities
trapped in the files. Disks marked with a 'U' prefix will be on
the whole 'utilities' based disks.
Today to prove a point I removed 12 very suspect disks from a box
I keep by the side of the A500 in the disk room. A couple I have
featured before as a salvage project. That is what this box of
disks is for. When I find busted disks I put them here. So I wasn't
expecting the disks to work. I was right. One or two were very bad
and took several passes to get them working. Only one of the disks
failed, and I sense it had suffered mechanical damage of some form.
In the end I copied ten of the twelve to a ZIP drive and then I
transferred to my my Amiga repository before placing onto USB and
ultimately onto this Win7 machine for use with the emulator. One
of the disks was seriously crap, I mean dreadful. It was an art
disk that wasn't worth keeping. So content failure.
One of the disks JonBench was a customised version of 1.3 WB and
was a working copy of the official Workbench. And so from my fist
full of busted disks I managed to salvage games, utilities, fonts.
music trackers, samples, pictures, magazines and Workbench'. A
truly rewarding process.
In truth there is very little reason to dispose of old disks. You
can also use DiskSalv and ARestaure to scan and salvage content
from faulty disks. The process is very rewarding and can be a load
of fun. I do enjoy my sessions recovering disks. You would be
amazed at what you find sometimes.
And seriously before you chuck a disk , send it to me, and I bet I
can fix it. I love a challenge.
I may just upload the contents of the archive at some point:
APD_DEC
AUIGMS2.ADF
FIXDISK.ADF
INVADERS.ADF
JEEVAN.ADF
JONBENCH.ADF
MAGNUM.ADF
MATGAMES.ADF
MPACK.ADF
NASHER.ADF
WSTATION.ADF
I will continue searching for SVDab.v.024 . The date stamp on the
file is too young to be associated with the SuperView libraries.
Amiga - Disk Salvage.
video tends to cause me issues. Featured
is the disk magazine Magnum Version 1.0 1992.
If you can only see this CONTENT window
then click the image above for the full site
Last updated 15th December 2024
Chandraise Kingdom
Keep the Faith
scuzzscink 2024