Back in the day, when I founded and ran an Apple ][ user group in
Fredericksburg, VA, one of my specialties was recovering data from 5
1/4 128K floppy disks that had gone bad. Data is written to the disk
in sectors, each one beginning with the address of the sector it is a
continuation of, and ending with the address of the next sector of the
file. And they were usually scattered pretty much at random all over
the disk, which had some 80 tracks of 48 sectors each. Combine that
with the first few headers of any file, which told you how many
sectors long the file was, and you could translate each sector from
binary (0's and 1's) translating only the beginning and end info. Once
you had all the sectors translated, it was just a matter of placing
the sector map together for each file.
This took a couple of days on a 126K disk with breaks so you didn't go
blind or nuts, less if the owner only wanted a particular file, I did
do a couple of 256K disks, but when Apple came out with 3 1/4 disks of
400K and 800K then 1.2 meg, I gave up.
Now imagine, even using sophisticated software they have now, mapping
and assembling the files on a 250 GB hard drive. My boot drive on my
iMac has used 109 GB and has 117 Billion bytes of data on it. No way!
On Feb 20, 2009, at 06:29 , Luiz Felipe wrote:
Matter of fact, worked 2 times with me (client hard drives) - but
then didn't work 8~9 times with yet other drives, so it's a chancy
proposition at best. The 2 hds did fail again after a short time,
and the process didn't work the second time.
If someone is willing to try this, do it as a last measure, after
all other tries have failed.
There are recovery experts, but often they are expensive and often
the data recovered is damaged or mixed - no names, no folders, just
files.
Joseph McAllister
[email protected]
http://gallery.me.com/jomac
http://web.me.com/jomac/show.me/Blog/Blog.html
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