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Re: Vista Support Software
Steven Hirsch wrote:
On 04/28/2012 09:13 PM, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
If you wish, I'll be able to attempt a recovery of the disk
around July of this year. I stress again that it is very unusual
for a properly stored disk in reasonable physical condition to
be unrecoverable. Apple 5.25" diskettes use relatively "fat bits",
and are remarkably reliable.
I appreciate your offer, Michael, but I've been contacted by someone who
has the Pascal driver diskette and is making me a copy.
It's intriguing to think that this might be readable, though. Maybe if
I find some time I'll try the things you suggest.
I should have mentioned one of the *first* things to try when
dealing with a "stubborn" disk: 8-bit ProSel's Volume Copy program.
It re-reads a bad sector hundreds of times trying to get a good read,
and, if that doesn't work, it asks if you would like to go on,
substituting a sector of zeroes, or retry for another few hundred times!
Often, the disk is "sparse", and the zeroed sector will be in an unused
area, so the copied disk is fine.
Enough time passes during the retries that you can do various "stunts"
with the drive to vary the instantaneous rotational speed--by lifting it
up and rotating it back and forth in a plane parallel to the table--
which is sometimes just what is needed to get a good read! ;-)
I recommend it as a first response to a persistent sector read error.
Just the repeated passes of the head over the track will sometimes
"clean things up" enough to get a good read.
-michael
NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."