Amiga Disk Collection Complete - Some Pointers

[GeoKM]

Hi All,

Well it took me a year, due to time constraints and attention to detail mostly, but I have finally managed to complete archiving my own 25-30 year old Amiga disk collection of ~ 300 disks for the sake of posterity. Thanks to Jim's awesome SCP. 8-)

Here are a few pointers that I found useful in my workflow.

1. Known Good Drive and especially Power Supply.
   
2. Clean the Drive after EVERY disk
   {*}Out of 340 disks I had > 90% success rate.
   
3. Amiga & SPLICE mode 3 Revs worked for ~60% of my disks.
   
4. 5 Revs Worked for the remaining 30%
   
5. After each disk I immediatly convert to .adf in SCP. If I see errors I clean and try 5 Revs. If still errors check conversion in HxC. (I don't know why but in ~5% of cases HxC made a good .adf where SCP didn't).
   
6. Finally Load .adf into WinUAE and check with DiscSalv 4.0. If errors, mount the .scp in WinUAE and check. Sometimes the .scp will PASS ok but the .adf FAIL. So you just make an .adf in WinUAE using a normal imager and save that as your .adf. Worked great. And you know the .scp is GOOD. This happened for me in about 10% of cases.
   
   

I was actually amazed at the condition of my disks after 30 years. Most of the ones that had faulty sectors were the either disks I already had marked as faulty sectors, or were cheap brand disks. Nearly all the Commercial disks and Magazine Disks were 100%.

8-)

Have fun.


I hope this info helps someone with archiving their collection.