You could spent even more money on a kryflux but probably the disks are just gone

Well, there is this this one for $9 w/ free shipping - http://www.ebay.com/itm/INCA-by-Sierra-Origin … dzI_igiyEwayokw

collector wrote:

Well, there is this this one for $9 w/ free shipping - http://www.ebay.com/itm/INCA-by-Sierra-Origin … dzI_igiyEwayokw

Nice! Using some search terms from your link, I found one for around $5.50 shipped:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Inca-PC-1992-14-4/231 … 309755856&rt=nc

Any idea what that 14-4* means in the title?

I'm going to try Norton DISKTOOL "Revive a Defective Diskette" first.

No idea about the 14-4*. Also try Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P29/Unstoppable%20Copier

Note that the CD version has CDA tracks for the music and speech. My installer will work with the CD version, but I was not able to work out a good way to concatenate/decompress the floppy's resources via an NSIS installer.

In general, late generation LS-120 drives are very efficient in reading dying floppies.
Ideally, wipe/revive operations would be better performed on the LS-120 drive as well, but AFAIK many old DOS utilities work only with real 1.44 drives.

A little off:

As years go, the best that remains are new-old-stock floppies, and even for those, for the occasional shape-up, one needs an LS-120 drive, a decent bulk tape eraser and several runs of utils like Norton Disk Tools, Disk Doctor, Spindisk etc.

Over at MSFN forums some guys took a serious dive into the matter. Multibooter's research comes to mind first... I followed his advice and can assure you that "ironing out" the bad floppies with the electromagnetic gun then a few runs of Notron Utils can do wonders on 60-70 percent of "Track 0 Bad, disk unreadable" floppies.

I can confirm that a LS-120 drive often reads disks that won't in a normal drive.

Just make sure the disk is in good physical condition, many old floppies shed their coating if they've been stored in bad conditions. If you can see lines in the media, nothing can save it.

No luck with Norton or Unstoppable Copier (typically gets about 4% integrity on the files in bad clusters), but I did find the unreadable files in "other locations" and was able to make the install work. I hate going that route, but I don't want to pay for the game twice just because my floppies went bad. If it was a better game, than yes. I've re-purchased some favorites on GOG just for the flexibility and bonus content.

I feel your pain 🙁

I've recently discovered a few later installation floppies of my own happen to be corrupt somehow and it's a version of a game that's no longer sold nor is even arrrrchived (just the later different cd release - which is still very much sold - is)

I thought about blowing them physically (which is a risk - don't try this) and persisting with VGACOPY with 99 retries

@leileilol: what game did you lose, if I can ask?

leileilol wrote:

nor is even arrrrchived

You obviously wouldn't have downloaded it illegally from an arrrrchive, even if it had been available, right? You have to be coherent! 😉