Help restoring very old ABackup floppy set

[dlfrsilver]

Well Toni's idea is good too, if you have an A1200, you can pick the tool here :
http://www.kryoflux.com/download/kffree_amiga_3.7.zip

write it on a fresh disk, then dump the disk 1/50 with it, then zip the resulting CT RAW dump, and zone it, i'll check it

[Starglider 2]

SuperDuper took about half an hour to scan the disk then reported: "There were errors"

I'd rather check the disks myself simply as I don't know what is on them. I even kept a diary on the Amiga at that time! What program would you be using to check the zipped disk?

Something that could just give me a hexadecimal read out of any data it sees would be good.

[Starglider 2]

I was briefly able to try 3 of the ABackup disks on an Amiga 1000 with a High Density floppy drive (retrofit) at the SCCAN Commodore meet up today, and they show as:

DF0:ABCK


I'd punched holes in the corners of each disk for reasons I forgot, but now remember was to make them High Density. It worked at the time, and who knows maybe they still do. I must've had a HD drive either in an A1200 or external to the A500. This explains why my stock A500 can't read them.



Now I need to find a HD floppy drive for my A500...

Edit: Just ordered the Chino FZ-357A on Amibay. Fingers crossed...

[Starglider 2]

It's time to update this thread. Long story short, I finally obtained a Chinon FZ-357A HD floppy drive and set it up with the A500. It can read all but 3 of the 46 ABackup disks I created in 1993! Luckily ABackup has a "Rebuild Catalogue" option, using only the readable files.

The exciting moment: https://goo.gl/mvCQPH

It seems incredible to me that an old backup on fake HD floppies with holes punched in them that sat in my parents' attic for 22 years can be restored!

Still there: https://goo.gl/GhRNSp

Even seeing the filenames brought back floods of memories. Deluxe Paintings I'd forgotten, lyrics I'd written, and one teenage letter to a girl started:

I'm not completely sure why I'm writing this but I hope that one day I'll get the chance to give it to you or at least just look back on it myself...

One day indeed!

I found one ironic file: https://goo.gl/mzdh9D The classified advert for Loot newspaper in the UK, created on my A500+, for selling that very same A530 and A500+. Talk about meta. That made me feel a bit guilty, but at least I kept the ad

ACCELERATOR FOR AMIGA - GVP A530 TURBO; 120MB HARD DISK; 40 Mhz 68030 PROCESSOR; 4MB OF 32-BIT RAM; MANUAL AND INSTALLATION SOFTWARE. NORMALLY AROUND £1100. WILL SELL FOR £800 O.N.O.
AMIGA A500Plus - WORKBENCH 2.04; 1MB CHIP RAM; MOUSE AND ALL MANUALS; AS NEW. WAS £329. WILL SELL FOR £150 O.N.O.

If you bought them can I have them back now

I found the creator of ABackup on Facebook and he was helpful and pleased.

Good times!

[Magic]

Congrats!

[Starglider 2]

Can anyone recommend a High Density disk repair program for the 4 out of 50 HD disks that have read errors? Ideally a program that fixes the disk itself rather than creating a fixed duplicate. Just because I'd like the original disks 'as is' after all these years

FixDisk doesn't seem to do anything for them.

[Arnie]

The problem is that if it's the disk surface that has the errors rather than file corruption then writing anything back is still going to have errors. The only option is to salvage what you can to a new disk.

[Starglider 2]

Ok fair enough, what's the best program to do that with its own GUI rather than CLI please?

[Arnie]

I use Disksalv for salvaging files. I would try a few, they only recover files, they don't write to disk.

[Starglider 2]

As ABackup uses its own disk structure I need a program that will copy Faulty Disk A to New Disk B, preserving as much of the data as it can recover. Such program exist?

[Arnie]

To be honest, I don't know. I've never used ABackup, (always seemed like you needed a 1000 floppies to do a backup).

Have you looked on Aminet?

[Starglider 2]

Edit: DiskSalv seems to do just what is needed! It has a "Repair-in-place" mode, and a "Salvage" to new disk mode.

[mark_k]

DiskSalv won't do what you want; it assumes OFS/FFS disk structure which your backup disks don't have. I strongly suggest you don't write to the disks which have errors, you'll only make things worse.

It's possible that more data could be recoverable from them, but you have to know what you're doing (and recover to another disk, not the original). Hardware like Kryoflux could possibly be used to recover more data from the disks. Basically, if only a single sector in a track is bad, the Amiga trackdisk.device refuses to read any of the 11 (or 22 for HD disks) sectors in that track. So recovery needs to read the disk with something other than trackdisk.device.

[Starglider 2]

Do you happen to know what FS ABackup uses?
Does the fact the disks are HD change the disk structure/file system from default OFS/FFS?

Obviously I wouldn't attempt a repair-in-place until after I have done a successful repair-to-new-disk as a backup (of the backup). But it's a nice feature to have so I can keep the original antique backup set 'as is'.

[mark_k]

ABackup doesn't use a filesystem as such. Whether the backup disks are DD or HD doesn't matter.

Even if you think you do a successful repair-to-new-disk (which I guess would involve replacing the bad/unreadable tracks with blank/empty data, meaning that some files would get corrupted on restoring the backup), like I said it's possible that you could do a better recovery (less file data missing) by reading the original disk in a better way.

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by mark_k

reading the original disk in a better way.

Care to clarify?

Edit: Just saw an addition to your post above re KryoFlux. I'm looking for a software only solution here, as this isn't life-changing stuff, just nice to have

[Arnie]

Toni's idea of using KFfree on an A1200, would dump the disk 1:1 as RAW. Readable in WinUAE. You could dump all the disks and use WinUAE to unpack to an HDF.

[Starglider 2]

I don't want to sound fussy and that's a great idea. It's just that I am restoring on the machine itself not via WinUAE (my CF hard disk is all set up and waiting – getting an .hdf file from the Mac onto a readable Amiga CF Card is nigh on impossible).

And I don't have access to an A1200.

If there's no way on the A500, that's fine, I'm just hoping and asking...

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by mark_k

ABackup doesn't use a filesystem as such.

Of all the options DiskSalv gives (FFS, OFS, etc. etc. etc.) which would you pick?

(If I use "Best Guess" it returns NDOS after half an hour, and won't Scan.)

[Arnie]

I guess you've tried all the copying programs, powercopy, maverick, xcopy etc....