I'd get (DL) a game from elsewhere and make a new copy of this disk. These disks are old, you can't realistically expect them to be 100% ok. Well, at least I don't expect it.

My guess is that the seller inserted each floppy disk and checked if the contents show up in explorer, assuming the disk is ok when the file names show up. He might not know that the names only come from the table of contents and that files might still be corrupted due to bad sectors.

Explorer as in Windows Explorer? Make sure the disk is write-protected if you care about its contents' originality.

I personally don't think it's realistic to expect disks to work 100% even if the seller said he tested them. True that gives me some hope that they will indeed work, but there are other factors involved that the seller isn't responsible for.. especially drive quality and cleanliness.

Heck, back in the day I used to always feel pessimistic when buying a software made of many disks, just because it highly increases the chances that one of them was a fail... and indeed it was common even for sealed new software. So for an 11-disk game, yeah.. I expect there would be some errors. Try to find matching disk images and restore the disk yourself. If you spot some dirt or irregular lighting on the disk surface, then you should clean it (e.g. alcohol). Some times the disk surface is perfectly clean yet it still exhibits read errors. This is usually magnetic flux gone wrong, and it can only be saved by rewriting the disk.

If the disk is clean (no dust or rings visible) I would try reading it on different floppy drives.
WinImage can be used to make an image. It has a "re-try" and ignore feature so you can try reading same sector again a few times, sometimes it works (I was lucky with 5,25" disks a few times).
Version 3 runs on Windows 3.1 on a 286, even. Later versions on Windows 9x and NT.
Just be careful with Windows 9x, it tries to modify each floppy disks it gets by writing its own signature into filesystem.

I'd make sure the drive heads are very clean, and try other drives (also very clean) if you can.

You can use my ImageDisk to see what sectors you can read, and to make a backup even with sector errors
in some places.

(ImageDisk also has "clean heads" function where (with some cleaning solution - or at least some alcohol - it
will "scrub" the heads back-and-forth, much more effective that "doing dir to make it spin.")

ImageDisk has to run under pure DOS because it access the floppy controller
directly and in traditionally non-standard ways. (ImageDisks primary purpose
is to archive/restore "vintage computer" media - that means ANY format the
the PC FDC can physically read/write - not just DOS/MicroSoft formats - I
even use it for old 8"s systems - I give information of making an adapter on
my site).

For this reason, ImageDIsk does not "go through BIOS" or make use of BIOS
floppy-drive configuration (my ImageDisk systems does not even have the floppy
configured in BIOS).

Best place to get it is: "Daves Old Computers" -> "Download Software/Images"
(near the bottom).

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

kaolinitedreams wrote on 2024-11-12, 22:53:

They want me to run explore and see the contents of the disk, but not sure what that will accomplish. What would be their reasoning for this?

Maybe "prove" to ebay that the product is "working" and avoid a refund, if it was sold as working?

DaveDDS wrote on 2024-11-13, 01:59:

You can use my ImageDisk to see what sectors you can read, and to make a backup even with sector errors
in some places.

Hey Dave, with IMGDisk it's indeed easy to identify on which side of the disk and on which track the error is coming from. But I've always wondered if the sector reported can be some how also physically mapped out on the disk's surface?
Example, if IMGDisk says sector 7 of 15 couldn't be read, would that mean it's about half the way of the track, starting from the index hole? Or are index holes not used on IBM PC for sector indexing (in which case it's impossible to guess the physical location of a sector)?

Thanks!

What game are we talkin' about?

I would brutally greaseweazle-it if the faulty floppy was in my handz...

I agree with the greaseweazle if you have one. It can pull raw flux oscillation patterns off, and then some radically more advanced error correction routines can be used to restore the original data.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-11-13, 07:06:

Hey Dave, with IMGDisk it's indeed easy to identify on which side of the disk and on which track the error is coming from. But I […]
Show full quote

DaveDDS wrote on 2024-11-13, 01:59:

You can use my ImageDisk to see what sectors you can read, and to make a backup even with sector errors
in some places.

Hey Dave, with IMGDisk it's indeed easy to identify on which side of the disk and on which track the error is coming from. But I've always wondered if the sector reported can be some how also physically mapped out on the disk's surface?
Example, if IMGDisk says sector 7 of 15 couldn't be read, would that mean it's about half the way of the track, starting from the index hole? Or are index holes not used on IBM PC for sector indexing (in which case it's impossible to guess the physical location of a sector)?

Thanks!

With soft sectored disks, the sector number is encoded into the ID field. The sector number reported by IMD is exactly what the FDC is reading off the disk. As for its physical position on the media relative to the index hole, that is determined by the interleave.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-11-13, 07:06:

Hey Dave, with IMGDisk it's indeed easy to identify on which side of the disk and on which track the error is coming from. But I've always wondered if the sector reported can be some how also physically mapped out on the disk's surface?
Example, if IMGDisk says sector 7 of 15 couldn't be read, would that mean it's about half the way of the track, starting from the index hole? Or are index holes not used on IBM PC for sector indexing (in which case it's impossible to guess the physical location of a sector)?

You can ... but it can be tricky.

With soft sector formats (which the PC uses) there is an "index hole" visible
through to little hole just outside the center "big hole".

There is a small opening in the media which goes by this hole once per
revolution, this marks the "start" of the track. Sector one will be the
first one to go by after this hole is seen.

There is also something called interleave... this spaces the sectors out to
allow more time between accessing sequential sectors:
For example on a 9-sector/track disk, sector ordering might be:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -- interleave 1
1 6 2 7 3 8 4 9 5 -- interleave 2
1 4 7 2 5 8 3 6 9 -- interleave 3
so you have to know the interleave in order to know where a certain sector
is on the media.
ImageDisk can tell you what interleave it sees.... so for example, if you have
a read error on sector 7 of a disk with interleave 3, you could check for
possible physical damage 3/9 rotation past the index hole.

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

There is a disk copy utility called HD-COPY.

You can try using that to make a copy of that floppy disk. HD-COPY can help to re-read bad sectors in the hope of transferring recovered sectors to a new disk.

Back in the day VGACopy was my life saver. With it I was able to recover data from many bad disks, but also do crazy things like format 1.44MB disks to something like 1.7MB.