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Re: Apple II floppy archiving notes
ohh god! I've got 800+ MORE disks to go, I already archived about a
thousand over the last summer. G R O A N .. ..
Andy McFadden wrote:
>
> During the past week I finally got around to doing something that I've
> been meaning to do for several years: archive my entire collection of
> 5.25" Apple II disks. After several long hours, I have completed the
> task, and thought the results might be interesting.
>
> The approach I took was:
>
> - Use ShrinkIt to create a disk image of the 5.25" disk. The images were
> written to a ProDOS disk partition on the hard drive.
> - Transfer the files from the IIgs to Linux over AppleShare.
> - Use UNIX tools (e.g. nulib) to verify that the disk images are valid.
>
> I transferred in this manner 499 sides of floppies. That's nearly 300
> individual disks, most of which are double-sided. Uncompressed, that
> represents a capacity of 68MB; after ShrinkIt compression, it occupied
> 36MB. It's somewhat disconcerting to think that, after taking all the data
> on every 5.25" disk I own, I'm looking for other stuff to include with it
> so I don't waste tons of space writing it to a CD-ROM. :-)
>
> Some disks, such as those with minor copy protection, couldn't be copied.
> Of those, I think only Microsoft's Olympic Decathalon will be missed -- and
> I'm guessing that's probably available on an archive site somewhere. (If
> not, I'll try to make a nibbilized image... the game is a classic.)
>
> Of those 499 images, 25 failed during the imaging process due to sector
> errors (5% failure rate). Some of these disks date back to early 1981,
> so it's fairly impressive that *one* bad sector would be detected on only
> 5% of the images. In only two cases did a disk have a bad sector on
> both sides, so it's not simply a question of inferior media. In a couple
> of cases there were multiple bad sectors on a single track.
>
> These failures were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Most seemed to
> happen on track 0 or track 35, so in many cases (disks with DOS or ProDOS
> on them) no important data was lost, though the disk couldn't be booted.
> Generally, "init" from the Bag of Tricks was used to stomp on the wayward
> sector. (I think Locksmith 6.0 had a nicer error-recovery feature, but
> I didn't have that, and nothing that died was really worth the trouble...
> I got lucky on the disks that matter most to me.)
>
> The moral of the story is: if you've been saying to yourself, "gee, one of
> these days I should go do something with all those old Apple II floppies",
> you might want to do something about it soon. 15+ years is a long time for
> magnetic media, and some of them are starting to give up the ghost...
>
> --
> Send mail to fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden)
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