VOGONS


First post, by Onyx Jaguar

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Howdy ya'll. I have what seems to be an unarchived (at least in the places that I've found) Big Blue Disk Issue 7 and I was testing it out for awhile (it was working) and ended up with a General Error. I cleaned the drive and I attempted to clean the floppy however ended up with the same general error, in Windows 3.1 it shows up as unformatted.

In the past I've been able to use the Floppy Recovery program that is available on Sourceforge.net with 3.25 inch floppies however I can't use that here. Basically this computer is an IBM Valuepoint with the A: drive being the 3.25 floppy and the 5.25 drive being assigned the letter B. The letters are assigned via cable select and cannot be changed in the BIOS (disconnecting drive A actually disables the whole chain). Are there any programs that allow me to dictate which drive I can attempt to recover from that work in MS-DOS?

Reply 1 of 3, by VileR

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A "recovery" program that cannot even be told the drive letter isn't something I'd trust with any disk.

It would be wise to try and create an image of the disk first, *before* you try any recovery tools on the disk itself - especially if it's already started going kaput.
Hardware solutions like a KryoFlux/SuperCard Pro are best for that, but for software-only I'd go with disk2img in both "track-at-a-time" and "recovery" modes (see the readme), and then ImageDisk.

For recovery/repair, my best results have been with Anadisk, but the process is rather low-level and requires work on the user's part so YMMV.

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Reply 2 of 3, by Onyx Jaguar

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VileR wrote on 2020-10-20, 14:53:
A "recovery" program that cannot even be told the drive letter isn't something I'd trust with any disk. […]
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A "recovery" program that cannot even be told the drive letter isn't something I'd trust with any disk.

It would be wise to try and create an image of the disk first, *before* you try any recovery tools on the disk itself - especially if it's already started going kaput.
Hardware solutions like a KryoFlux/SuperCard Pro are best for that, but for software-only I'd go with disk2img in both "track-at-a-time" and "recovery" modes (see the readme), and then ImageDisk.

For recovery/repair, my best results have been with Anadisk, but the process is rather low-level and requires work on the user's part so YMMV.

Excellent info. I remember using disk2img way back in the day, but search engines are so busted nowadays that it queues up a bunch of garbage relatively unrelated to "actually" recovering data

EDIT: For instance on the hardware side I was only getting Zoom floppy matches, no mention of the KryoFlux. I suppose floppy recover is more desirable at this point on C64, but still

Reply 3 of 3, by VileR

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Onyx Jaguar wrote on 2020-10-20, 23:35:

search engines are so busted nowadays that it queues up a bunch of garbage relatively unrelated to "actually" recovering data

Yep... it gets progressively worse, too. I'm pretty sure a lot of it has to do with google's recent steps to demote HTTP-only content and promote HTTPS. That effectively destroys the visibility of older websites, so relevant information to what we do here is relegated to obscurity.

Good luck with the disk! Would be interested to know if you successfully archive it.

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