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Re: Repair Apple II Prodos 3.5" disks?



A2Pro wrote:
Hi!

On Dec 13, 3:47 am, Stephen wrote:

I have 4 unreadable disks with business spreadsheet receipts on them.
Have tried several repair programs top no avail:  ProSel, resurrection,
Bunker utilities.  Any suggestions?  Can not copy the files OR the disk.
Repair service by an individual?


    Look at the surface of the media by pushing the metal covering
over the access hole to one side.  Keep your fingers out and hold the
disk so you can see the reflection of a light source off the surface
of the media.  You should see an image of the light source.  Any
visible damage to the surface, especially circular lines, probably
means the data on the disk can't be recovered.

I concur that this would be a "bad thing".  ;-(

However, the problem may be as simple as a drive out of alignment.

How many drives have you tried to read them on?

It's unusual for several disks to fail at the same time unless a
drive is messing them up--and as Willi pointed out, a drive *can*
mess them up irretrievably.

If you can't make a "bit copy" of what should be a "normal" disk,
then something is *very seriously* wrong.  And running a recovery
program on the original disk is extremely dangerous--it is easy
to do more harm than good.

Recovery programs are a little like Russian roulette--it may work,
or it may further damage the data.  Running several recover programs
sigificantly increases the probability that at least one of them
will do something that you will regret...

Um, do you have backups?  ;-(

If you run out of options, I'd be willing to take a look at the disks
and attempt to recover data.

-michael

NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."