Re: Ressurecting Old Apple ][ disks

[ah499@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (John Daniels)]

Rob Pfile has a problem:

 >some of the bits on my disks (10 years old, some of them) have
 >evaporated. Is there any copy program out there (I have heard Locksmith
 >6.0 might be able to do this) that might be able to salvage some of my
 >disks?

I would say that if the bits are totally gone the sectors that contain those
bits are probably unrecoverable if they're program files.  Textfiles and
stuff like that could be patched up manually with a sector editor or the
disk could be copied with COPYA modified so that it ignores errors when reading
but writes what it thinks it read to a properly formatted disk.

I wouldn't give up the bits as totally gone until you try this with Copy II Plus
 - use the Verify Disk function to find out where your bad sectors are.  If you
want you could do this several times to see if it misreads the same sectors 
every time.  If not it might also be a drive speed or alignment problem rather
than loss of magnetic flux.  Anyway - take note of which are the bad sectors.
Go to the Bitcopy 5.25 option of Copy II Plus and choose the Sector Editor.  Try
to read one of the bad sectors that the Verify function pointed out.  If it reads it then write it back to disk in the same spot it was.  If it doesn't read it
then try again.  And again.  I've found that sometimes the bad reads on
weak disks will be intermittant and once in a while you can get lucky and get
a good read out of it.  If you do just write that sector back to disk again
right away.

						John Daniels
						ah499@cleveland.freenet.edu