Matthew Carpenter wrote:

>*ACK*
>I just pulled out some more of my DOS 3.3 floppies and tried to mount
>them....one of them mounted!
>
>So I stick one of other ones and what do I get when I boot to it? "ERROR #8" 
>
>apparently a bunch more of my disks have gone bad over the past few
>months....ugh.

All may not be lost, yet.  Try making a copy of the disk(s) using reduced
error checking.  Copying under DOS 3.3 after a POKE 47426,24 will
ignore all checksum and epilog errors.  There may still be data damage,
but you may find that almost all of the disk is recoverable.

More advanced techniques may render them fully usable.  For example,
the errors may be just in the first three tracks, which can be easily
replaced with a fresh copy of DOS 3.3 (assuming that the DOS is
standard).

Of course, doing a good head cleaning and/or speed adjustment may
also make your disks readable again.

As soon as you can read them at all, copy them to produce fresh
disks.

-michael

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Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/