Bottom head did something to the disk. FWIW: those clamp marks tell me the disk itself was failing with aged media but the score on bottom of disk says bottom head has an issue....
just a quick observation...Yes the disk may be ruined.

It's cooked. Probably shedding. Inspect and clean drive heads immediately

Well I have a semi happy ending. I figured I had nothing to lose so I went to town for the last hour or so on the disk with isa alcohol. It cleaned up the circle on the outer edge pretty well, the stuff in the center seemed like physical damage though and the alcohol didn't do anything there.

But good news is that I tested the disk anyway in my known good drive and it works again... However due to the other damage, I'll probably just retire this one to the game box forever.

After all this extra effort to try to install the game from original disks, it seems the circa 1992 installation program is incompatible with my whopping 2gb hard drive, telling me I have no space to install the game when I very much do 😆.

Another ironic aspect, the game manual literally tells you to immediately make backup disks of the game disks. Now how many other commercial games did that!

Ah, I see you got the Australian version of the installation manual for that game!

If you have the disk reading again, and a known good drive ... I suggest using something like
my IMAGEDISK tool to read it into a file so you can recreate it at any time.

If it's a simple DOS disk, you might get away with my "much simpler" XDISK tool

(The fact that they advise you to make backups means it probably is a simple DOS disk)

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-03-18, 02:53:

Another ironic aspect, the game manual literally tells you to immediately make backup disks of the game disks. Now how many other commercial games did that!

Ironic for your case yes.

But actually, it really was the practice, often frequently mentioned in documentation of some commercial software, to go ahead a make a copy of the floppy and use the copy floppy for regular use, and not the original. After all, some disks would get a lot of use -- floppy only systems -- and known that wear will eventually get them. This is why, if you ever happened across someone's personal disk collection, alot of the time, there are copies of commercial software in it. (sometimes they are referred to as backups, but more or less) It wasn't like everyone was pirating all the time. The original disks probably got separated over time.

Now some companies did use copy protection (some games did), which kind of meant you could not copy it. But then those sometimes had replacement programs to replace a broken disk for a fee.

So I don't think don't copy that floppy had any impact, and came really late anyway. Because we were doing it anyway for practical reasons. Years later, when I saw it the first time, I laughed, saying well what were you going to do if your purchased floppy broke? It wasn't really all for piracy. Broken disks were a fact of life then.

Creating an image from a physically damaged (floppy) disk isn't very good idea. If the game's user manual "tells" that you can make a copy of all the files by using COPY command and all the files on the damaged diskette are still readable, then just copy them to another diskette. If you care to preserve the original creation date & time of the files, I'm pretty sure there are some 3rd party DOS tools to copy the files without altering a new file creation date & time. Probably you can transfer the original sticker to a healthy 5.25" diskette.