ADFread issue

Hiya all, just got round to transfering my aging box of floppies, and getting strange results...

Built up an old Pentium 4 system especially for the task, on an ECS P4S5A2 motherboard - it has dual floppy support on a single controller, with additional bios options to select the floppy sizes - 880 kb, 1.44 Mb or 2.88 Mb.

All looks good, however every disk ADFread processes reports 160 faulty sectors. Sometimes it's 156, but usually 160. Every disk!

Some bad sectors are inevitable, but this consistent number seems to indicate something else, and i'm stumped what's wrong.

I'm getting some data - most of the discs are Octamed modules - but many are missing samples due to these sector faults.

I've tried all the obvious things - different Windows versions (XP, Vista and 7 - all x86), testing MS DOS discs (all fine), cleaning floppy heads (redundant as PC discs work OK), swapping the drives around, changing the BIOS floppy size settings, to no effect... every copy reports 160 or 156 bad sectors.

They seem randomly distributed - some tracks read as fully intact, others report 0/11 sectors OK, some 5/11, 8 or 9/11 etc. etc., yet the total always sums to 160, or occasionally 156.

This number has to be a clue to the problem, so has anyone encountered this before, or see any significance to this number?



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ETA upon trying the same disc twice i notice that the first time it reports 156 faulty sectors with 12 tracks read error-free, however the second attempt finds 157 faulty sectors with just 4 tracks error-free.

Also i now notice there's 160 tracks per disc (duh!), hence the source of that number... so it's averaging a sector fault on almost every track, although in reality, like i said they seem randomly distributed with anything from 0 to 11 sectors OK per track...

[Supamax]

Hi mate,
years ago I tried, too, to use ADFread without success .
I used two different PCs and 7-8 floppy disk drives (SD and HD), but still had many errors.
I don't know the reason. However I decided to radically solve it by buying a cheap (25 euro) A600HD + CF-PCMCIA adapter and then I dumped thousands of disks .

Cheers for the tip - i looked at resorting to an adapter, or networking a real Amiga, but figured i'd give this rig one last go, trying Disk2FDI instead...

100% success!

I installed Win98SE on a FAT32 partition, ran Disk2FDI from DOS and the only disks that failed were probably already knackered when last used 20-odd years ago.. I've been getting full images of disks from '91 / '92 without problem.

And good God, some of my tunes back then were awful, awful... but there's one or two crackers i'm chuffed to get back, some i'd totally forgotten which were nice surprises..

The WinUAE site should have a link to Disk2FDI along with ADFread, since the latter seems to have inherent problems with some of the systems it's supposed to be compatible with.

Anyhoos, i've got some Octamed modules to remix...