I would like to thank everyone who responded to my
inquiry..
Many good ideas were posed. In the end, last weekend,
I was able to recover the files. Here's how I did it.
I was able to recover the disks using DISK2FDI.
www.oldskool.org
Surprisingly, I was able to read all 10 disks and dump
their contents to image files. It wasn't seamless as
I would have liked...but it did work.
DISK2FDI will work on Apple 2, Amiga, Commodore, and
some other types. It uses a unique method of using
two drives simultaneously to fool the FDD controller
to read the disks. I used the public domain version,
but the author also sells an improved version that
uses the parallel port as a synchronization means.
For anyone attempting to use this program, here is
what I have found.
The program requires a 5.25 plus a 3.5 drive setup. A
standard DOS formatted disk (blank) is used in the 3.5
drive and is accessed as the application reads the
5.25 inch disk.
Not all 3.5 inch disk drives will work with the
application. I received numerous errors trying to
read the disks until I found a 3.5 inch drive that had
a "better quality, (not pseudo?) " synchronization
pulse.
Then the application read all 10 of my disks with no
errors....eventually. I am not sure why, perhaps the
dust infested drive, or questionable floppies, but
initially, the DISK2FDI application issued bad sector
warnings on several tracks. I found that if I redid
it many times.. (upwards of 15) on some disks, that
eventually the bad sector count actually dropped down
to zero.
The application produced image files of each disk.
The application is also format aware, and correctly
recognized the disks to be Apple DOS 3.3 disks.
I then used a program called Apple II Oasis for
Windows to retrieve the individual files from the
image. All files were AWP document files. The
ADMANAGR application in this Oasis extracted the files
from the image.
I was impressed that the exact file names and date and
time stamps were available. Most of the files were
from 1990.
I then searched the web and found a utility called
awp2text to convert the AWP files to nicely formatted
text files.
I would like to thank all who offered me hardware or
who offered to image my drives on their hardware.
These offers were very generous.
As far as what the files were....and why someone would
want to retrieve files from some 14 year old disks...
These files came from my father-in law. They were
from my wife's grandmother who had chronicled her life
from "the old country" to Ellis Island, to living in
New Haven Connecticut. The stories are precious. The
disks were found recently when cleaning up her
affairs.
Thanks again to all...
Sety
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