Re: Apple 2 floppy disk repair/analyzer?

[Polymorph <polymorph69@hotmail.com>]

On Jul 18, 8:17 am, dangerman <thedangerman...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm going through some old floppies on my Apple //e and I stupidly
> screwed one up somehow.
>
> I CATALOG'd it fine, and then ran a few of the programs, and now it is
> pretty much hosed.
>
> Not to worry I thought, I'll use DARK, the Disk Repair Kit program -
> that goes through and even if there are bad sectors on track 11, it
> can usually repair some of them or allow you to salvage some of the
> files.
>
> No dice - it couldn't recover anything.
>
> Then I tried a disk sector analyzer and it showed that plenty of
> tracks were nothing but FFs - but some sectors did have data on them.
>
> So 2 questions - 1) are there any other floppy repair programs besides
> DARK?
>
> 2) What is the most friendly sector/nibble viewer - I recall using one
> to edit text in games - it showed the data in hex on the left and in
> plain ASCII on the right...?
>
> And I realize I should be working on copies and should be moving data
> off ancient media to modern hard/opical formats...that was why I got
> out the stuff in the first place.

OK, this is becoming a common problem for people who wish to access
their old floppies. The problem is most likely that you have dirtied
your drives heads by reading an old dusty/dirty disk. Depending upon
how dirty your disk was, you may also have caused some damage to the
disk itself. I too had this unfortunate experience a couple of years
ago with particularly dirty disks - in my case, if I hold the disk up
to a light, I can see lines etched into the floppy from larger pieces
of dirt/grime that was build up over 15+ years of disuse.

I know other people on this forum have good advice for the cleaning of
floppies, so I'll leave it up to them to advise you on these
practices. But you probably want to clean up all your old floppies
before using them again.

However, for cleaning the heads on your 5.25" drive, see a scanned
article on my website for details on how to do it manually:
http://apple2.sytes.net/Floppy_Maintenance/index.html

Alternatively if you are uncomfortable pulling apart your drive, you
could try and source a 5.25" floppy drive cleaner like this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260312845818

I suspect that once you clean your drive, it will be operational
again. I can't say for certain if the floppy you used will survive
though. Just don't run any more floppies through until you've had a
chance to either clean them, or verify that they are not the cause of
the problem.

Cheers,
Mike