Re: Recover old Sider II drive.. Help?

[a2aviator@gmail.com]

 > I've gotten to the point where I can boot with a ProDOS disk, and
can
> do a PREFIX /HARD1. That works OK, but once I try to do a CAT or
> something, I get an I/O ERROR.

If you can do the /HARD1 prefix then the drive is not 'frozen'. It's
spinning up and it's partition map and volume names are being read by
ProDOS on the slot scan.

Take Block Warden and to read blocks. Read other blocks besides
$02-$07,

If this thing reads but does not work on the catalog track, that is- it
gives an error $27, then the drive has probably got bad sectors at that
point. A choice is to recover it block for block onto another hard
drive volume and then run ProSEL Volume Repair (ProSEl 16) or Mr. Fixit
(ProSEL 8) on that volume. Main Directory Repair.

There is one thing with Mr. Fixit and Volume Repair.

*NEVER* ... thats Nev ... ver. As in do not ever.

Do NOT ever, ever, answer *yes* to the "Assume Valid Bitmap" when
asked.

Do that and forget it. just forget it.

Again, DO NOT ANSWER YES.

Ironic, yes is the default.

Do not answer yes.

The reason you need to block copy it to another drive is you can't
usually format blocks on a hard drive. On a floppy, you can just use
Photonix to copy it, for example. You do not have to copy it to the
exact same volume size, larger will do. But smaller will usually not
work.

At this exact moment I can't recall the name of something that will
copy block ranges in ProDOS..

Point is, you're going to copy the contents and then do a main
directory repair, it will scan the drive and find file entries and
rebuilt a main directory. This usually gains you files that are in
subdirectories but anything in the root is usually lost.

If you get a bad block on just $02, or whatever the first block of the
catalog is, but the second block reads iwth Block Warden, then on the
bitmap block where it points to the first block of the catalog, just up
that by one hex digit. you'll not see the first five file entries. But
perhaps some of your sub directories were added later.

My block # recollections may be incorrect, see Beneath Apple ProDOS for
the proper block locations.