Salvaging bad disks via emulator?

[DPainter]

I have a lot of corrupt DMS and ADF files that are 880k in size, but they either crash WinUAE/Winfellow right away or after a few tracks. I suspect most of these contain bad tracks rather than just unemulated code.

Does anyone recommend a way to attempt salvaging these in an emulated environment? I thought about trying to disk copy them, or run disk salv, but I'd like to hear from experience.

I have about 12 more DOCS disks not in the Tosec dat that just crash the emulator when I load them. Using a hex editor, I can see some text on the disks, so they aren't totally gone.

Dpainter

[Twistin'Ghost]

It just sort of depends on the disk itself. I downloaded a game called Fals Bike with a [b] flag on it, but it just guru'd before it ever ran the startup-sequence. I renamed the startup-sequence so it would not load to verify that the (non-standard) bootblock was the culprit (and it was). It was one of those virus protection bootblocks, so no loss, I re-installed. Rebooted and executed each command from the startup. The final of three commands was called reset. And that's just what it did. It was a lose-lose situation. The diskname was "System 5 ! Compilation No.71" and contained filenames 1-5 in the root. I executed each file and they all ran with no problems (Fals Bike, Crusaders Hot-Wired one parted music disk, Kyrios demo, Do! Run Run, and Yogi's Great Escape++). So I made a new startup-sequence which created a generic menu. The disk is no longer [b] and the filename is no longer "Fals Bike (19xx)(New Wave)[b].zip".

I have not had any luck recovering files from a disk via DiskSalv under emulation, but that doesn't mean it won't work. Simple test. Delete a file on disk, then try to recover it. If the physical sectors of the original disk contained hard errors, there's no real chance of recovery, though.