Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Bob, Mon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: How to recover trashed floppies?
Message-ID: <6109@iuvax.UUCP>
Date: 11 Feb 88 05:13:39 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Bob, Mon)
Organization: Schizophrenics `R` Us
Lines: 36

I need some help with a couple of trashed floppy disks.  The problem is as
follows:
	A friend has two disks which had contained text files, were written
to on a particular PC, and now report "General Format Error" when trying to
read their directories.  I believe that the PC had a fairly badly misaligned
disk drive (I'm too embarrassed to say how I think it got misaligned), and
that it tried to write to the directories of these disks (as well as to some
of the data tracks) and thereby made 'em unreadable.
	At any rate, most of the data is still there.  Norton Utilities v3 had
some problems due to wanting to immediately read the (unreadable) directory;
but I faked it out with an okay disk and then did sector-by-sector reads on
the bad one.  By using Sidekick to grab each displayed sector as it came up,
I was able to reconstruct the most important document...eventually.  It's
worth noting that a group of unreadable sectors would appear every once in
a while, in a quasi-periodic fashion (maybe truly periodic -- I didn't think
to keep track soon enough).
	Umm, I should also mention that I couldn't recover anything by treating
it as an erased file.  Norton searches the directory for erased file entries,
and the directory is totally unreadable.  A diskcopy of the trashed disk
claimed to be completely unused, with no file entries (erased or otherwise)
in its directory.  So, nothing to unerase.

	Now, there _has_ to be a better way.  Maybe I can fake out the unerase
with a different disk, then "recover" it sector by sector.  Is there anything
better that I'm overlooking?  What about a program that just reads each sector,
writes what it gets to a different file (on a different drive, of course),
and ignores any errors (such as in the directory?)  Diskcopy isn't quite doing
this, as it is trying to make an exact copy of the disk and I just want to
put all its contents in a file or files somewhere else.  Any ideas??

Thanks for any help,
	Bob Montante		bobmon@iuvax,cs.indiana.edu,
					whatever my signature may say.

-- 
You TOO Can Defeat The 4-Line .signature Limit And Be Obnoxious To Your Friends	And Neighbors!!!!!								...---...									Charles Cabbage on the Difference Engine running SE grade 10W40 at UKnoWhere	Babble@diffEQ	bob,mon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu	Chucky on Ada	The Slide Rules!"Spaceship Earth!  There IS no substitute!"