>On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 19:42:16 -0000, James Button wrote: > >>Getting somewhat off topic, >>For a damaged drive, or partition.. >>UNLESS YOU HAVE ADEQUATE BACKUPS.... >> >>First approach for an unreadable but working drive should probably be to >>acquire software to read the drive sector by sector , and image the drive >>onto a similar one >>(If the drive cannot be read, to replace the controller board and try >>again ) >> >>If the drive cannot be imaged - or a reasonable percentage of the source >>imaged then it's a case of pay Ontrack or whoever,
Not so fast -- first, run SpinRite: http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm At 02:29 PM 1/11/2006, Hugh Gundersen replied: > >Funny you mention this because in 1990 I was working in a school and the >deputy head teacher considered I was light years in front of their IT guy >(10 computers and a steel door?). > >The guy was doing a Masters degree and had all his thesis on a floppy >disk...... You guessed. It became unreadable [...] > >Early days of the PC and I had a copy of "Norton" [...] > >Took me 2 days to drag every bit of text off the floppy in a sensible >readable order [...] > >Can't do that with Norton any more................. You said, 1990 -- that was Norton Utilities v5.0 ? Norton Utilities v7.0 (1993) had DISKTOOL.EXE -- and I think earlier versions did too. The purpose of DISKTOOL (54 KB) was (is) to "Revive a Defective Diskette". I often used it, to revived dead floppies, or recover unreadable files. Recently I ran DISKTOOL to "revive" a floppy disk from a command prompt on Windows 2000, and it worked, although the display text was scrambled. Are there other "Revive Defective Diskette" programs -- or was Norton Utilities v7.0 (DOS, 1993) the last one ? Why did Norton abandon what worked perfectly well ? ( probably Symantec's fault... ) Bill --- -- ---------------------------------------- WIN-HOME Archives: http://PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM/archives/WIN-HOME.html Contact the List Owner about anything: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Official Win-Home List Members Profiles Page http://www.besteffort.com/winhome/Profiles.html
