I've tried reading about five dozen Amiga floopies on my charter cruise with the SuperCard Pro. I'm using a generic drive I had in the pile. Most disks seemed to have read well. One or two yellow blocks here or there. I've improved the reading on some disks by cleaning the inside magnetic-media cookie with a cotton swab dipped in isopropyl. I'm keeping the head clean that way, too. All ordinary disks - no copy protection.
I've spotted a failure mode on some of these old disks: the cookie becomes unglued from the metal hub, so turning the hub doesn't turn the media. Any advice?
I had maybe two or three disks that didn't read well at all. The manual wasn't clear about what green/yellow/red really meant. I found a post here that said that yellow should mean the data was still good, but I'm finding that it is a bit more arbitrary than that. Some yellows bring good data, others don't. There's no log file. Where can I get a better idea of what's happening during a read?
I'm opening the ADFs in Windows 7 explorer with ADFview. I'm examining ADF files in hex. If nothing's read because of a failure of the disk (see above), the ADF starts out full of zeroes. When there's some data read, but it's failing to open as ADF, I'm seeing areas that appear to be filled with non-random garbage like "DOSx" where byte 'x' counts up from 0x00, or changes to "DOWx", etc.
Once I had a blue-screen BSOD crash pointing to the FTDI driver when I disconnected the USB cable from the computer. Ouch.
I've spotted a failure mode on some of these old disks: the cookie becomes unglued from the metal hub, so turning the hub doesn't turn the media. Any advice?
I had maybe two or three disks that didn't read well at all. The manual wasn't clear about what green/yellow/red really meant. I found a post here that said that yellow should mean the data was still good, but I'm finding that it is a bit more arbitrary than that. Some yellows bring good data, others don't. There's no log file. Where can I get a better idea of what's happening during a read?
I'm opening the ADFs in Windows 7 explorer with ADFview. I'm examining ADF files in hex. If nothing's read because of a failure of the disk (see above), the ADF starts out full of zeroes. When there's some data read, but it's failing to open as ADF, I'm seeing areas that appear to be filled with non-random garbage like "DOSx" where byte 'x' counts up from 0x00, or changes to "DOWx", etc.
Once I had a blue-screen BSOD crash pointing to the FTDI driver when I disconnected the USB cable from the computer. Ouch.