How to read recalcitrant floppies?

From: Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org>
Date: Mon Apr 19 10:43:04 1999

John Foust wrote:
>
> At 11:52 AM 4/17/99 -0700, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> >I am attempting to back up some floppies from a project I did a few years
> ago.
> >The sets of 3.5" 1.44Mb IBM floppies have been stored in a box, in a cool and
> >dry room. Out of one set of 12 and one set of 15 disks, I have four disks
> >that have read errors that DOS won't get past, bad sectors and the like.
> >
> >Are there any tools to go divining on DOS floppies that work better than
> >an endless succession of "R"etries?
>
> Try several different drives on different machines. Drives can be
> out of alignment with respect to each other, and this includes the
> machine that wrote the disk as well as the machines that read them today.

One of the projects I've always wanted to try is to take the radial
adjustment on some floppy drives and replace it with a micrometer
adjustment. Although I don't know for sure, I would imagine this would be a
somewhat standard setup for companies that recover data. I don't see an easy
way to make the azimuth adjustable, and I'm not sure it would be necessary
(at least for purposes of recovering data.)
Received on Mon Apr 19 1999 - 10:43:04 BST