[dencorso]

Multibooter, on Sep 18 2009, 06:39 PM, said:

WinImage worked in this case with your floppy drive, but not with mine.

Oh! Right! I think, then, that it was I that misread you. Well, you see, here we are deep into the YMMV land!!!
I sometimes wonder what wonderful drive and controller Gilles Vollant must have for all the options in WinImage to work right in his machine, even under Win XP! Why, under XP, the most I can do with WinImage is work with already created images, besides collecting 1.44 MB and 1.2 MB images from the 3.5" and 5.25" drives, respectively. From 3.5" floppies, 1.68 MB (DMF or with 224 dir entries) also work, provided I don't try to format. And that's all.

Another very useful tool (which is now quite difficult to find) is Cleaner, which can wipe the driver's heads in a much more thorough way than simply issuing a "DIR" command (and telling DOS to retry 3 or 4 times), when used together with a conventional head cleaner diskette (alas! those are also difficult to find today) wet with isopropanol or ethanol (I consider ethanol much better as cleaning liquid than isopropanol, and have been using it for cleaning the heads of diskette drives and tape decks since before the 4004 hit the market, and it never caused any damage to my hardware, despite the legends against it). Cleaner *only* works when run in *true* DOS. When trying to recover data from old floppies, I always clean the heads after I'm done (and often even during the process). Old floppies can soil the heads quite badly (some say it's mold, I don't really know) and prevent them from reading right. CLEANER.ZIP has fcab9d6c3d7a5e96b0ef819fe64e30fd as MD5 hash and f30530c6e8ef2b81f4fe8bfb3df3f6357d95e349 as SHA1 hash and is 29,168 bytes long, just for the record. And, of course, for calculating both MD5 and SHA1 hashes there is microsoft's own excellent FCIV.

[Multibooter]

dencorso, on Sep 18 2009, 03:46 PM, said:

Another very useful tool (which is now quite difficult to find) is Cleaner

This is the most thorough head cleaner I have seen. I tried Cleaner on the regular 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive with the bad floppy with the track 0 errors: Before cleaning DskImage reported 30 unrecoverable sectors. After cleaning with a special HD (2 punched holes) 3.5" cleaning diskette, DskImage reported only 3 unrecoverable sectors. So cleaning the drive head does make a difference.

BTW, I also have two 3.5" cleaning diskettes which have only 1 punched hole, i.e. DD. Is there any difference between cleaning diskettes with 1 and 2 holes? Are cleaning diskettes with 2 holes especially made for 1.44MB drives? How does one tell whether a cleaning diskette is abrasive or not?

Quote

I consider ethanol much better as cleaning liquid than isopropanol, and have been using it for cleaning the heads of diskette drives and tape decks since before the 4004 hit the market, and it never caused any damage to my hardware, despite the legends against it).

I used a liquid which came with a 5.25" cleaning diskette, it contained isopropylalcohol, alkali, acetone, carbide, free acid and water. I hope the floppy drive will still work next week.

I have made already bad experience with cleaning the head of a floppy drive. After cleaning the head of one 5.25" drive, with a 5.25" cleaning diskette and 96% ethanol, maybe 5 years ago, the floppy drive was dead. I don't dare to clean the 2 external 5.25" floppy drives of the Toshiba T3200, they are irreplaceable, they are connected to the parallel port (only one at a time) and a switch sets them to either bootable A or B drive. One of these external drives is a 360kB 5.25" floppy drive, the other a 1200kB 5.25" floppy drive. Even run-of-the-mill 360kB 5.25" floppy drives are scarce today, several days ago I checked at ebay, but I couldn't find any 360kB 5.25"drives or 720kB 3.5" drives.

About 5 years ago, when I made the first attempt at archving my old floppies, I wrecked an external 5.25" Microsolutions backpack floppy drive by somehow causing a short-circuit with the connector of the external power supply. The 5.25" Backpack worked fine connected to the parallel port of my laptop, comparable to current 3.5" USB floppy drives. I didn't buy a replacement, only 1 or 2 are sold at ebay each year, and they don't go for less than $200 with many bidders.

Quote

Cleaner *only* works when run in *true* DOS.

Cleaner worked fine in a Win98 DOS window.

Addendum: After I ran Cleaner, I wasn't able to format floppies with the floppy drive anymore. Running Cleaner apparently stresses the floppy drive very much or the cleaning fluid caused problems, until it had evaporated. 8 Hours later, however, the floppy drive worked fine again, actually much better than before. It took VGA-Copy v5.3 maybe 30 seconds to read the bad track 0 of my damaged floppy, compared to 30 minutes before.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 19 September 2009 - 04:06 AM

[jaclaz]

dencorso, on Sep 19 2009, 12:46 AM, said:

(alas! those are also difficult to find today)

3.5" are easily found:
http://www.lindy-usa.com/31-2-floppy-disk-...aner/40411.html

point is that the example above costs 12 bucks whilst a new floppy drive can be found for as low as 10 US$ P&H included:
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=1.44MB%20....m14&_pgn=2

I guess this item was mislabeled/mispriced :
http://www.superwarehouse.com/Teac_1.44_MB...FC929/p/1533255

@multibooter
JFYI, this is outrageous :
http://www.mitsubish...om.au/895.htm#4.

http://www.superwarehouse.com/LS-120_SUPER...T/41066/p/59773
Image found here:
http://demo7.ibiz10.com/ibiz10Demo7/images...cts/149073w.jpg

A semi-random idea, investing in the past:
http://cgi.ebay.com/LOT-of-540-3-5-1-44MB-...id=p3286.c0.m14



jaclaz

[Multibooter]

VGA-Copy
VGA-Copy has become freeware, v6.25 can be downloaded from here, then -> VGA-Software, then -> vgacp625.zip

I have been using v5.30, which works fine as a data recovery tool for bad floppies. v6.25, however, canNOT be recommended as a data recovery tool. When trying to copy the floppy with a bad track 0, v6.25 just gives me the message: "Diskette nicht lesbar" [=diskette not readable].

I don't know where one can get this old v5.30 now. I had bought the old retail v5.3 on a software CD called "VGA-Ware" about 15 years ago. I had rejected v6.02 and v6.21 and preferred v5.30. VGA-Copy is another good example that the last version of a piece of software is very often NOT the best version.

Clearing the floppy drive
There is one trick to running VGA-Copy v5.30: If it doesn't accept a floppy, just remove the floppy from the floppy drive and then click on Read (without the floppy inserted). This somehow clears the floppy controller, and VGA-Copy v5.30 then works fine. A similar clearing of the floppy controller is done automatically by TeleDisk and GRDuw after writing/formatting a floppy, with a loud disk-access noise for about 2 seconds. The floppy controller can also be somehow cleared by running Chkdsk in a Win98 DOS window, with no floppy inserted. I have on my Windows Desktop an MS-DOS shortcut to "E:\USWIN98\COMMAND\CHKDSK.EXE A:" for clearing the floppy drive.

BTW, I am using VGA-Copy v5.30 on an old 750MHz Pentium 3 laptop with Slowdown v1.01 and the following command line: "D:\VGACOPY\SLOWDOWN.COM /1600 VGACOPY.EXE"
Setting the right Slowdown parameter (here "/1600") is a matter of trial and error. I have not yet used VGA-Copy v5.30 on my faster dual-core desktop and don't know whether it will run there with Slowdown. In any case, VGA-Copy does have problems working with modern fast CPUs and needs a Slowdown-type program.

VGA-Copy v5.30 also works fine with Slowdown under Windows XP. VGA-Copy v5.30 can format under WinXP a 720kB 3.5" floppy disk to 360kB and 180kB (SS)

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 19 September 2009 - 06:17 AM

[dencorso]

Slowdown is also freeware, but not easy to found. I've attached below a .7z archive containing both v. 1.01 and 3.10 (the last).

Multibooter, on Sep 18 2009, 09:33 PM, said:

Quote

Cleaner *only* works when run in *true* DOS.

Cleaner worked fine in a Win98 DOS window.

It seems this also lies in the YMMV land, then.

Multibooter, on Sep 18 2009, 09:33 PM, said:

Addendum: After I ran Cleaner, I wasn't able to format floppies with the floppy drive anymore. Running Cleaner apparently stresses the floppy drive very much or the cleaning fluid caused problems, until it had evaporated. 8 Hours later, however, the floppy drive worked fine again, actually much better than before. It took VGA-Copy v5.3 maybe 30 seconds to read the bad track 0 of my damaged floppy, compared to 30 minutes before.

Well, that's why I don't trust formulated cleaning fluids. Ans since you had a bad experience with ethanol (I doubt it was the responsible for your old FDD's failure, though... It may just have reached its end-of-life) I'd reccomend pure isopropanol (a.k.a. isopropyl alcohol) as the cleaning fluid of choice. It's fast to dry and leaves no residue nor moisture (which was probably the reason your FDD took so ling to get back to working condition). Anyway, YMMV here also.

@jaclaz: cleaning floppies are extremely rare and expensive, by now, at least in Brazil. And the 5.25" ones seem not findable anywhere, although I did stumble on one 8" cleaning floppy (!) during my searches (sorry, I didn't save the link to it). Nowadays I have just one 3.5" and one 5.25" cleaning floppies, and I remain on the lookout for more, locally, because usually you cannot buy just the floppy, and the cleaning liquid would entail lots of problems with the customs in case I tried to buy them abroad.

jaclaz, on Sep 19 2009, 07:46 AM, said:

I guess this item was mislabeled/mispriced :
http://www.superwarehouse.com/Teac_1.44_MB...FC929/p/1533255

For sure! It cannot cost that much even if handcrafted from solid gold!
Of course, your 1st link on FDDs has the right price. Here I can find them for R$14.99, which is about US$7.00!
Including P&H, that would rise to about US$14.00. See here.

Attached File(s)

•  slowdown.7z (84.29K)
  Number of downloads: 11

[Multibooter]

dencorso, on Sep 19 2009, 09:59 AM, said:

Slowdown is also freeware, but not easy to found. I've attached below a .7z archive containing both v. 1.01 and 3.10 (the last).

The author of Slowdown, Bret Johnson, has a new home page http://bretjohnson.us/ He also posted there a new DOS USB driver a few days ago. There is no particular reason that I am using v1.01, it has just worked fine for me with VGA-Copy v5.3 during the past 9 years.

dencorso, on Sep 19 2009, 09:59 AM, said:

I'd reccomend pure isopropanol (a.k.a. isopropyl alcohol) as the cleaning fluid of choice. It's fast to dry and leaves no residue nor moisture (which was probably the reason your FDD took so ling to get back to working condition).

I have dared to clean the external 360kB floppy drive of the Toshiba T3200, with pure isopropyl alcohol, and the drive is still alive.

Quote

cleaning floppies are extremely rare and expensive, by now, at least in Brazil. And the 5.25" ones seem not findable anywhere

I bought about 5 years ago a supply of five 5.25" cleaning floppies and three 3.5" cleaning floppies.
@jaclaz
Thanks for the links about the Imation LS-120 Superdisk head cleaning kit, I've put it on my shopping list, whenever I find one reasonably priced.

CopyStar v4.31b
SH-CopyStar is a Win95 program which can format 360kB 3.5" floppies under Win98 and does not need Slowdown. The right "b" version can be downloaded here The "b" version has an uninstaller, while the version without the "b" doesn't, otherwise they are identical. CopyStar is only useful for creating special format floppies under Win98, without VGA-Copy+Slowdown. CopyStar is shareware which is not offered for sale anymore by the authors and is kind of abandoned. BTW, to format with CopyStar, you have to click in the Format window on "Format", not on "Ok"

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 19 September 2009 - 04:03 PM

[dencorso]

Here's another interesting program: Bad Block Copy for Windows. While I still didn't test it, I'm quite familiar with the quality of Alter's other products (UniATA and patched flpydisk.sys for Win XP), so I'm sure it's worth having a copy of it.

[cannie]

Concerning floppy drive cleaning procedures, maybe you find funny and also useful to know what happened to me during a weekend, about one year ago .

The CD drive stopped working. I thought that the device head was dirty. I didn't have anything at reach to clean it, but the home vacuum cleaner.
Well, I opened the CD tray and held the vacuum cleaner tube end just against the center of it, then I switched it on at full speed and kept sweeping for a couple of minutes.
It seemed like a miracle: the CD worked again and it still keeps working OK one year later, no problems at all and no need of anything else.

So I think: if the only problem is accumulated dust at the floppy device head, the home vacuum cleaner could be a solution.

After this excellent and unexpected experience, if I ever have this problem the vacuum sweeper will be the first thing I'll use, before trying any other solution.

HTH

This post has been edited by cannie: 22 September 2009 - 03:16 AM

[jaclaz]

Multibooter, on Sep 19 2009, 11:49 PM, said:

The author of Slowdown, Bret Johnson, has a new home page http://bretjohnson.us/ He also posted there a new DOS USB driver a few days ago.

Thanks for the heads up.

Passing the info :
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...ic=9127&hl=

jaclaz

[dencorso]

Multibooter, on Sep 19 2009, 06:49 PM, said:

dencorso, on Sep 19 2009, 09:59 AM, said:

Slowdown is also freeware, but not easy to found. I've attached below a .7z archive containing both v. 1.01 and 3.10 (the last).

The author of Slowdown, Bret Johnson, has a new home page http://bretjohnson.us/ He also posted there a new DOS USB driver a few days ago. There is no particular reason that I am using v1.01, it has just worked fine for me with VGA-Copy v5.3 during the past 9 years.

After your post #29 made me aware of it, I hunted for all versions of it, and eventually found them. So I decided to make available here v.1.01 because that one is difficult to find *and worked for me also in Win XP*, while v.3.10 did not (in XP, of course... that's my experience, but YMMV here too). But I decided to include v.3.10 also, because they're very different programs and v.3.10 is very useful outside the NT-family OSes, *and* because of the fantastic slowdown.doc that accompanies it. Bret Johnson is a very thorough documenter, and his manuals are a great and enlightening read (same applies to usbintro.doc in the USB driver package). In any case, just for the record, Bret Johnson explicitly allows the redistribution of slowdown, as I quote below, in his own words:

Bret Johnson (in slowdown.doc) said:

You can freely copy and distribute SLOWDOWN.COM, as long as it is distributed along with this SLOWDOWN.DOC, and neither file has been modified in any way.

[Multibooter]

There are several other Slowdown-type utilities. There is a newer v1.03 of Slowdos. Older v1.02 was posted by Glenn9999 at posting #7. Slowdos is part of Flopper [= bootable-disk emulator], which seems to be quite interesting.

I have not yet tried Slowdos, Throttle or Flopper, but eventually I may when I try to get Uniform v1.07 going on my dual-core desktop, hopefully in a Win98 DOS window. On my 12MHz Toshiba T3200 portable I can, with Uniform, access files under one drive letter as DOS and under another drive letter as CP/M, both in DOS commands and in applications. But Uniform may have a slowdown problem.

On my old Toshiba T3200 under DOS 6.22, for example, I have an external 5.25" floppy drive attached, which is assigned by DOS the drive letter B:. With Uniform v1.07 I have defined this SAME physical floppy drive as CP/M, HP-125 format and Uniform has assigned the CP/M-drive letter D:, i.e. one physical floppy drive has 2 drive letters, one for handling DOS floppies, the other for handling CP/M floppies. Under DOS, when I read from or write to D:, Uniform converts transparently the data from/to the CP/M file system. With Spellbinder v5.4, for example, [=an old DOS word processor], I can read file B:xxx from a DOS floppy, make some changes to it, insert a CP/M floppy, and then save it as D:yyy. The file yyy will then be written on the CP/M floppy, with no file dates.

The major benefit of the CP/M file system is that there are no file dates, i.e. nobody can tell when you were doing what with the floppy. Maybe I will eventually be able, with any application running in a Win98 DOS window, to read from and to write to real CP/M-formatted floppies...

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 20 September 2009 - 09:27 AM

[Multibooter]

Warning about files extracted with WinImage from floppy disk images
When you have a floppy with file system errors (FAT copies are not the same, lost clusters, cross-linked files, etc) and make an image of it, the floppy disk image will also contain these file system errors. Some files extracted lateron with WinImage v8.1 from such a bad floppy disk image may be corrupt and differ from the files on the original floppy. The files copied from the original floppy with xxcopy and the /v2 parameter for byte-by-byte verification may differ from the files extracted by WinImage -> Image -> Extract. Sometimes WinImage flags during the extraction that a file is different from the original one with the error message "Error writing file xxx", but NOT always.

If you are certain that the original floppy had no file system errors, then you are fine, the files extracted from the image are identical to the original files.

If you did not check the original floppy with ScanDisk or NDD for file system errors prior to making the image, then you cannot be certain that the files extracted by WinImage v8.1 are identical to the original files. To identify floppy images with file system errors, one could extract the floppy image to a floppy, and then run ScanDisk on this floppy. ScanDisk can then usually repair the files, so that they will be identical to those file-copied with xxcopy.

Whenever ScanDisk reports errors or GRDuw displays read error messages during the creation of an image file, I add BAD to the filename of the floppy image file, e.g. xxxxBAD.dcf so that I remember later that some files extracted from the image by WinImage may not be identical to the original files.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 21 September 2009 - 03:22 PM

[Multibooter]

Data recovery: Floppy with bad sectors in the data area (i.e. not on track 0)
I have just finished recovering 2 bad floppies with an LS-120 floppy drive and DskImage in a Win98 DOS window..

One floppy eventually was read correctly after placing it in the freezer for about 5 minutes. The freezer really helped.

The other bad 1.44MB floppy had initially 15 bad sectors in the data area. I had to create 33 floppy images with DskImage until I got 2 images where DskImage did not report any errors. After each image made I slapped the floppy about 10 times with full force against my thighs, and this treatment apparently caused DskImage to encounter fewer and fewer bad sectors. DSKIMAGE_RETRIES was set to the maximum of 10. After 10 images I put the floppy into the freezer for 10 minutes, this again reduced the number of bad sectors immediately. After another 10 more images I gave the floppy a break for 8 hours, then continued, a little break did help.

DskImage is an unstoppable copier, in contrast to GRDuw, which fails/aborts frequently with the message: "unrecoverable disk error".

The 2 image files with no bad sectors were amazingly a little different from each other on the last track, may be a bug in DskImage which reported "no sectors were unrecoverable" or because that last track was "empty", outside the data area. The 2 nearly-identical image files produced both good files. ScanDisk reported a damaged folder and found lost file fragments.

The original floppy was a little damaged in the process, I had to remove the metall slider. Before the harsh treatment of the floppy xxcopy16 was able to file-copy many files Ok, with their original filenames and file dates. After the harsh treatment xxcopy didn't see 20% of the files anymore on the original floppy.

In any case, the data on this bad floppy was completely recovered, and the lost fragments recovered by ScanDisk were identical (+ some junk at the end) to corresponding files obtained initially by xxcopy. I archived the files obtained with xxcopy because they had good file names and file dates.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 22 September 2009 - 10:20 AM

[Multibooter]

Data recovery: "There is no floppy in the drive"
I just recovered and archived a floppy which most copying/imaging programs couldn't handle:

Windows Explorer: "The disk in A: is not formatted"
WinImage: "There is no floppy in the drive"
GRDuw: "Unrecognized Media"
DCF: "Address Mark not found - track 0"
SH-Copy Star: "Error while analyzing the disk"
VGA-Copy: "Diskette nicht lesbar" [=Diskette not readable]
DskImage could only produce a useless image file, with no files visible in it; it displayed "12 sectors were unrecoverable" (all on track 0)

The solution was TeleDisk v2.23. I made a .td0 image of the floppy. When TeleDisk reported that sectors 1+2 of track 0 were bad, I just pressed Enter. Then I restored the .td0 image file to a preformatted floppy, and voilá, Windows Explorer displayed all the files of the bad floppy.

The files had the same size and creation date as those on a similar original floppy, but many files had different content. ScanDisk gave the error message "This drive contains one or more backup copies of the file allocation table", I selected repair, and then the files were identical to the corresponding files on that similar original floppy.

I could also create a readable copy from this bad original floppy with Anadisk v2.10 (May 1995), but after repairing the file system with ScanDisk, 1 resulting file was different from the other similar original floppy. So TeleDisk v2.23 (Sept.1996) seems to make more accurate copies/repairs than Anadisk, at least in this case.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 22 September 2009 - 11:36 AM

[jaclaz]

Why in my day....

...
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...21362&st=10

http://tinyapps.org/blog/misc/200702250700..._in_my_day.html

... and we LIKED it!

More seriously, in ye good ol' days everyone used Norton Utilities and handcrafted FAT or partition tables in those cases.

jaclaz

[dencorso]

jaclaz, on Sep 22 2009, 02:39 PM, said:

More seriously, in ye good ol' days everyone used Norton Utilities and handcrafted FAT or partition tables in those cases.

Way back when... at a time when DISKEDIT.EXE was known as NU.EXE. But before that there was DEBUG.EXE (or, better, DEBUG.COM)... . And even before that, DDT86.CMD (or, better, DDT.COM)... Yea, been there, done that...



...and we liked it!

[dencorso]

Multibooter, on Aug 10 2009, 06:39 AM, said:

Currently unsolved problems:
2) Uniform v1.07 under DOS can make a directory listing of, but not read CP/M files with filenames which contain characters illegal under MS-DOS (e.g. the file "CP+.COM" on a CP/M floppy cannot be read by Uniform v1.07 because it contains a "+" sign in the file name). Uniform v1.07 displays the error message: "A bad character was found in a CP/M filename; some files may not be accessible"; the Uniform user manual suggests "You probably have to perform the renaming function on a CP/M machine".

Solution: Load a raw image of the diskette to WinHex (or your favorite hexeditor), search for the filenames which contain illegal characters, replace the illegal characters with legal ones, save the image and work with it or with a floppy created from it. It's much faster to do it than it is to describe the procedure.

Later added unrelated comment:
I clean my FDD's heads with cleaner sparingly, don't get me wrong. When the FDD begins having difficulties reading known good floppies, I always try the DIR method first, which is less aggressive, and, only when that isn't enough (which is not often), I resort to cleaner. Now, when working with very old floppies, I do clean more often, but I haven't done that much with the 5,25" FDD, recently, because I think I've already backed up all that I needed to, and because such FDDs are really difficult to replace, nowadays. With the 3.5 FDD, on the other hand, I have done plenty of recovery of late, but they are still easy and cheap to replace (and I have bricked 3 of them in the last 2 years, while at it...). On the third hand, I've done plenty of strange formatting of good, clean, new media, with both FDDs, for many reasons, along many years, but that doesn't soil the heads much, and is good to assure the FDDs are in good working order.

[Multibooter]

2 programs I have used for archiving my old CP/M floppies, Uniform and 22Disk, together with a 20-year-old MicroSolutions UniDOS CP/M CoProcessor Card were just sold at ebay for $185. The price jumped from $81 to $185 in the last few seconds, by the bidding of 3 experienced bidders with over 600 feedbacks. Over 400 pageviews of the item, I have never seen a UniDOS CP/M CoProcessor Card offered at ebay before.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 01 October 2009 - 07:09 PM

[dencorso]

For the sake of completeness, here are William Luitjee's freeware floppytools, which contains the unique FLOPSKEW, which is very useful for determing the correct skew parameters to be used in formats having more than 18 sectors per track. It also includes another program for head cleaning, FLOPSCRB, which however I never did test, since I either use the DIR method or resort to Cleaner, when things get really ugly.

Attached File(s)

•  flpkit11.zip (66.49K)
  Number of downloads: 7

[jaclaz]

Unrelated, but not much , and before this info pops out of my head, I am sure Multibooter will appreciate this (unless it's non-news):
CP/M Player for Win32
Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP Console:
http://homepage3.nif...takeda-toshiya/
http://homepage3.nif.../cpm/index.html

jaclaz