Comments on: Sad Day for Floppy Disks

By: Eduard

Eduard — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:18:04 +0000

It was ages ago, but if I remember well the utilities disk that came with the 1541 was able to recover files that were “deleted”, because it would find the programs directly on the disk surface despite having being wiped out of track 18 (remember that deleting merely removed their reference in track 18). I would definetely give this a try.

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:53:52 +0000

I think that if you have disks that only have track 18 bad, there’s hope. I’m pretty sure there were undelete utilities that would just scour a disk for valid file chains and assign arbitrary filenames to them. So if you can make a D64 image with an empty track 18, then run one of those utilities within an emulator, you may be able to salvage the contents.

And your story makes me wonder where my Commodore disk boxes are, and what I should do about it. But they have spent the past 10 years in my cool and relatively dry basement.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:53:09 +0000

@Jimmy & Ion: I’m pretty sure it’s my disks at this point. I’ve tried a couple of different floppy drives (both a 1541 and a 1571) and had the exact same results. I haven’t aligned the one I’m using now, but I have cleaned the lens.

I’ll have to research cleaning old floppies a bit more before I give up hope on some of these.

By: AArdvark

AArdvark — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:16:47 +0000

There used to be a disc scanner program that could simply read the ones and zeros on a floppy. Can’t for the life of me remember the name, I think it was some utility included on a copying cart. I never used it, was more interested in the duplication aspect. Anyway, was wondering if it would be possible or even desirable to rebuild a disc if you could simply grab the raw data and stuff it into a D64 file. This would only be for stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else.

By: Ion Farmer

Ion Farmer — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:10:32 +0000

I had a similar situation when I archived my floppies initially. Thankfully, I found that the floppies weren’t the failure point for me. As best as I could ascertain, the floppies had built up some dust and/or magnetic wear products and the act of archiving them built up some residue in my drive. I cleaned the read/write head and I was fine again. I hope this is the case for you.

I’ve been desperate enough to go after an old floppy disk with a swab and alcohol as it’s last stop to the trash and have had some mixed results, but again it was with media I considered as ruined.

I wish your archiving efforts the best!

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:51:35 +0000

The commodore disk drives often had head alignment issues, you sure you disk isn’t out of alignment?

By: Derek

Derek — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:09:15 +0000

Wondering what a memory dump of those disks might show. I’ve rebuilt old COBOL apps from formatted floppies via said method. Then again, they were good disks and this was all in Windows land.