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Here's a stumper (for me) that I hope someone can help out with.
I've found a bunch of old 5.25" disks that I'm currently imaging. After buying an old Teac drive off eBay plus the FC5025 USB-5.25 controller (highly recommended, works great) I'm able to image disks with abandon, and for the most part I'm able to archive about 90% of the disks.
I've noticed that for some reason some of the disks appear to have been quick formatted... I can mount the image without issues (it appears as a 360KB "empty" drive with no files) and when I look at the image in a hex editor, I see a normal boot sector, but after that the list of root files are all E5'd (hex E5 replacing the first character of each filename) plus the next couple of sectors wiped out. After that, I see all the data. So, it's as though the disks were quick-formatted. Maybe I did it. Maybe some family member did it. Maybe cosmic rays happened to hit these disks all in exactly the same way zero out just those critical first few sectors. Who knows. In any case, there's data on there that (from the mangled E5'd filenames) I know I want to get back. We're taking save games from the 1980s here... critical stuff!
Back in the day there were plenty of tools to analyze/recover/unformat with varying degrees of success. And today there are no shortage of tools. However my struggle is,
- The current tools just don't work. Most of them don't know what to make of a 360KB image; they're designed for recovering accidentally formatted 1TB drives. I've tried Stellar Phoenix, Recuva, etc... most struggle to even access the image, directly from the .img or when mounted.
- I can't find any of the old tools, or, can't remember which were the good ones from 15 years ago.
So, I guess what I'm looking for help with are,
1. Do any of the modern recovery tools SPECIFICALLY handle logical recovery of old floppy disks?
2. If not, any leads on an older tool that could be coaxed to work in dosbox, that at its time represented the state of the art in logical recovery?
I've found a bunch of old 5.25" disks that I'm currently imaging. After buying an old Teac drive off eBay plus the FC5025 USB-5.25 controller (highly recommended, works great) I'm able to image disks with abandon, and for the most part I'm able to archive about 90% of the disks.
I've noticed that for some reason some of the disks appear to have been quick formatted... I can mount the image without issues (it appears as a 360KB "empty" drive with no files) and when I look at the image in a hex editor, I see a normal boot sector, but after that the list of root files are all E5'd (hex E5 replacing the first character of each filename) plus the next couple of sectors wiped out. After that, I see all the data. So, it's as though the disks were quick-formatted. Maybe I did it. Maybe some family member did it. Maybe cosmic rays happened to hit these disks all in exactly the same way zero out just those critical first few sectors. Who knows. In any case, there's data on there that (from the mangled E5'd filenames) I know I want to get back. We're taking save games from the 1980s here... critical stuff!
Back in the day there were plenty of tools to analyze/recover/unformat with varying degrees of success. And today there are no shortage of tools. However my struggle is,
- The current tools just don't work. Most of them don't know what to make of a 360KB image; they're designed for recovering accidentally formatted 1TB drives. I've tried Stellar Phoenix, Recuva, etc... most struggle to even access the image, directly from the .img or when mounted.
- I can't find any of the old tools, or, can't remember which were the good ones from 15 years ago.
So, I guess what I'm looking for help with are,
1. Do any of the modern recovery tools SPECIFICALLY handle logical recovery of old floppy disks?
2. If not, any leads on an older tool that could be coaxed to work in dosbox, that at its time represented the state of the art in logical recovery?