Re: Apple 2 floppy disk repair/analyzer? (Apple FAQ)

[Nick Westgate <nick.westgate@gmail.com>]

On Jul 18, 10:49 am, Polymorph <polymorp...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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

I nominate this for the FAQ.

Cheers,
Nick.