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From: hamachi@KIM (Gordon Hamachi)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: A Disk Recovery Tale
Message-ID: <8511161155.AA10811@kim>
Date: Sat, 16-Nov-85 06:55:02 EST
Article-I.D.: kim.8511161155.AA10811
Posted: Sat Nov 16 06:55:02 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 20-Nov-85 01:06:33 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 40

This amazing tale of disk recovery may help someone else out.

After spending hours laboring over the disk "foobar" I was alarmed and
dismayed to see the "Do you want to initialize?" dialog box.  The standard
tricks I'd used successfully in the past didn't work:

    1.  Try inserting the disk repeatedly (non-repeatable errors?)
    2.  Try inserting in the other drive (alignment problems?)
    3.  Try turning the Mac off for a while (reset everything?)
    4.  Try warming up the bad disk (thermal expansion alignment problems?).
    5.  New system disk (bad software?)

It was time for Fedit.  After carefully reading the documentation I browsed
the disk and found that the directory was screwed up in a big way.  Time to
hand-patch?  Yes, but first I had to make a copy of the disk, and experiment
on that.  No problem.  Fedit lets you read sectors from one disk and write
them to another.  Unfortunately, my troubles were not yet over.  There was
Bomb #25, out of memory, after only 20 sectors were copied.  Oops.

After rebooting, an amazing and heartwarming sight appeared:  "The disk
foobar needs minor repairs".  Okay.  And when the disks had stopped
spinning, there before my eyes was a resurrected disk.  Actually, all it had
was the directory entries of my lost disk "foobar".  Somehow, miraculously,
the directory blocks on my "trashed" disk were fixed as they were copied
to the new disk.  They couldn't be read by fedit nor by the Mac's disk insert
handler, but they could be copied.  How can this be?  You tell me.

Reaching into the freeware toolbox once again, I pulled out MacClone 2.0
and used that to copy my trashed "foobar" onto a blank disk.  Fortunately,
like Fedit, MacClone doesn't care if the disk is "unreadable".  It goes ahead
and does its best anyway.

Viola!  I mean, Voila!  Four hundred thousand recovered bytes!
The moral of the story:  sometimes you can copy things you can't read.  If you
don't believe me, that's okay, I hardly believe it, but I still have the bad
disk and the recovered data!

Hmm, time to pay for some (more) freeware.

--Gordon Hamachi