First post, by HunterZ
- Rank
- l33t++
So I've got a bunch of old 5.25" IBM PC formatted floppies in my closet that are 15-25 years old. Some are original game disks (gutted from their now-flattened boxes), and some are full of random shareware I picked up from random BBSes and friends. Some are 360KB double-density disks and some are 1.2MB high-density disks.
I've been meaning to image/copy them all onto CDs/DVDs for years now, so I have a couple questions for you all:
1. Has anyone else with similar disks worked with them recently? How have they held up over the years?
2. Some of the 360KB disks are formatted with some special utility I picked up at one point. It formatted them in a different way (80 tracks instead of 40 maybe?) that let them hold something more like 800KB, but I had to run a TSR (FM80.COM maybe?) in order to be able to read them. They also tended to have a lot of bad sectors because the disks just weren't designed for that. Does anyone else know what I'm thinking of, and is there any chance of recovering the data from these? I can boot DOS or Win98 on an "old" PIII-550 if needed.
I've probably got some unknown goodies rotting away on those things that I'd like to put back into circulation (like I already have with Vampyr, Dungeon Explorer, Daemon's Quest 1-3, etc.) as well as random stuff that I haven't seen on the 'net that would be fun to revisit via DOSBox.