Multibooter

There are several other Slowdown-type utilities. There is a newer v1.03 of Slowdos. Older v1.02 was posted by Glenn9999 at posting #7. Slowdos is part of Flopper [= bootable-disk emulator], which seems to be quite interesting. I have not yet tried Slowdos, Throttle or Flopper, but eventually I may when I try to get Uniform v1.07 going on my dual-core desktop, hopefully in a Win98 DOS window. On my 12MHz Toshiba T3200 portable I can, with Uniform, access files under one drive letter as DOS and under another drive letter as CP/M, both in DOS commands and in applications. But Uniform may have a slowdown problem. On my old Toshiba T3200 under DOS 6.22, for example, I have an external 5.25" floppy drive attached, which is assigned by DOS the drive letter B:. With Uniform v1.07 I have defined this SAME physical floppy drive as CP/M, HP-125 format and Uniform has assigned the CP/M-drive letter D:, i.e. one physical floppy drive has 2 drive letters, one for handling DOS floppies, the other for handling CP/M floppies. Under DOS, when I read from or write to D:, Uniform converts transparently the data from/to the CP/M file system. With Spellbinder v5.4, for example, [=an old DOS word processor], I can read file B:xxx from a DOS floppy, make some changes to it, insert a CP/M floppy, and then save it as D:yyy. The file yyy will then be written on the CP/M floppy, with no file dates. The major benefit of the CP/M file system is that there are no file dates, i.e. nobody can tell when you were doing what with the floppy. Maybe I will eventually be able, with any application running in a Win98 DOS window, to read from and to write to real CP/M-formatted floppies...

The author of Slowdown, Bret Johnson, has a new home page http://bretjohnson.us/ He also posted there a new DOS USB driver a few days ago. There is no particular reason that I am using v1.01, it has just worked fine for me with VGA-Copy v5.3 during the past 9 years. I have dared to clean the external 360kB floppy drive of the Toshiba T3200, with pure isopropyl alcohol, and the drive is still alive. I bought about 5 years ago a supply of five 5.25" cleaning floppies and three 3.5" cleaning floppies.@jaclaz Thanks for the links about the Imation LS-120 Superdisk head cleaning kit, I've put it on my shopping list, whenever I find one reasonably priced. CopyStar v4.31b SH-CopyStar is a Win95 program which can format 360kB 3.5" floppies under Win98 and does not need Slowdown. The right "b" version can be downloaded here The "b" version has an uninstaller, while the version without the "b" doesn't, otherwise they are identical. CopyStar is only useful for creating special format floppies under Win98, without VGA-Copy+Slowdown. CopyStar is shareware which is not offered for sale anymore by the authors and is kind of abandoned. BTW, to format with CopyStar, you have to click in the Format window on "Format", not on "Ok"

I fully agree with CharlotteTheHarlot.I am using with my dual-core desktop under Win98 a ViewSonic 2030b monitor (1600x1200 resolution), which also has a USB 2.0 connector/hub, but I never use the USB 2.0 connector. This USB 2.0 connector was probably intended for a USB mouse or a USB keyboard, which I don't use because I have turned off in the BIOS "Legacy USB Support". USB devices therefore are not yet recognized by the computer at the time when the System Commander menu comes up with the operating system selection menu, i.e. before the USB driver or an operating system is actually loaded. I am using a serial, not a USB, mouse and keyboard, which work fine. And of course, wireless devices don't work at the time the operating system selection menu is displayed. On my older Dell Inspiron laptops I have installed nusb 3.3 and am using the Orangeware driver v2.4.1 for USB 2.0 hubs.

VGA-Copy VGA-Copy has become freeware, v6.25 can be downloaded from here, then -> VGA-Software, then -> vgacp625.zip I have been using v5.30, which works fine as a data recovery tool for bad floppies. v6.25, however, canNOT be recommended as a data recovery tool. When trying to copy the floppy with a bad track 0, v6.25 just gives me the message: "Diskette nicht lesbar" [=diskette not readable]. I don't know where one can get this old v5.30 now. I had bought the old retail v5.3 on a software CD called "VGA-Ware" about 15 years ago. I had rejected v6.02 and v6.21 and preferred v5.30. VGA-Copy is another good example that the last version of a piece of software is very often NOT the best version. Clearing the floppy drive There is one trick to running VGA-Copy v5.30: If it doesn't accept a floppy, just remove the floppy from the floppy drive and then click on Read (without the floppy inserted). This somehow clears the floppy controller, and VGA-Copy v5.30 then works fine. A similar clearing of the floppy controller is done automatically by TeleDisk and GRDuw after writing/formatting a floppy, with a loud disk-access noise for about 2 seconds. The floppy controller can also be somehow cleared by running Chkdsk in a Win98 DOS window, with no floppy inserted. I have on my Windows Desktop an MS-DOS shortcut to "E:\USWIN98\COMMAND\CHKDSK.EXE A:" for clearing the floppy drive. BTW, I am using VGA-Copy v5.30 on an old 750MHz Pentium 3 laptop with Slowdown v1.01 and the following command line: "D:\VGACOPY\SLOWDOWN.COM /1600 VGACOPY.EXE" Setting the right Slowdown parameter (here "/1600") is a matter of trial and error. I have not yet used VGA-Copy v5.30 on my faster dual-core desktop and don't know whether it will run there with Slowdown. In any case, VGA-Copy does have problems working with modern fast CPUs and needs a Slowdown-type program. VGA-Copy v5.30 also works fine with Slowdown under Windows XP. VGA-Copy v5.30 can format under WinXP a 720kB 3.5" floppy disk to 360kB and 180kB (SS)

This is the most thorough head cleaner I have seen. I tried Cleaner on the regular 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive with the bad floppy with the track 0 errors: Before cleaning DskImage reported 30 unrecoverable sectors. After cleaning with a special HD (2 punched holes) 3.5" cleaning diskette, DskImage reported only 3 unrecoverable sectors. So cleaning the drive head does make a difference.BTW, I also have two 3.5" cleaning diskettes which have only 1 punched hole, i.e. DD. Is there any difference between cleaning diskettes with 1 and 2 holes? Are cleaning diskettes with 2 holes especially made for 1.44MB drives? How does one tell whether a cleaning diskette is abrasive or not? I used a liquid which came with a 5.25" cleaning diskette, it contained isopropylalcohol, alkali, acetone, carbide, free acid and water. I hope the floppy drive will still work next week.I have made already bad experience with cleaning the head of a floppy drive. After cleaning the head of one 5.25" drive, with a 5.25" cleaning diskette and 96% ethanol, maybe 5 years ago, the floppy drive was dead. I don't dare to clean the 2 external 5.25" floppy drives of the Toshiba T3200, they are irreplaceable, they are connected to the parallel port (only one at a time) and a switch sets them to either bootable A or B drive. One of these external drives is a 360kB 5.25" floppy drive, the other a 1200kB 5.25" floppy drive. Even run-of-the-mill 360kB 5.25" floppy drives are scarce today, several days ago I checked at ebay, but I couldn't find any 360kB 5.25"drives or 720kB 3.5" drives. About 5 years ago, when I made the first attempt at archving my old floppies, I wrecked an external 5.25" Microsolutions backpack floppy drive by somehow causing a short-circuit with the connector of the external power supply. The 5.25" Backpack worked fine connected to the parallel port of my laptop, comparable to current 3.5" USB floppy drives. I didn't buy a replacement, only 1 or 2 are sold at ebay each year, and they don't go for less than $200 with many bidders. Cleaner worked fine in a Win98 DOS window.Addendum: After I ran Cleaner, I wasn't able to format floppies with the floppy drive anymore. Running Cleaner apparently stresses the floppy drive very much or the cleaning fluid caused problems, until it had evaporated. 8 Hours later, however, the floppy drive worked fine again, actually much better than before. It took VGA-Copy v5.3 maybe 30 seconds to read the bad track 0 of my damaged floppy, compared to 30 minutes before.

On my machine I had "pre-formatted" three 3.5" target floppies to 360kB (with the Win95 program SH-CopyStar v4.31b, with FDFormat under DOS and with VGA-Copy v5.3 plus SlowDown v1.01 in a Win98 DOS window). I then selected in WinImage "Write disk" (NOT "Format and write disk") to transfer an image of DOS 2.00, also of DOS 3.10, and got an error. WinImage worked in this case with your floppy drive, but not with mine. DiskImageDskImage v1.0 by M.Brutman is an excellent program. It does work with my LS-120 floppy drive. Here is an illustration of the importance of using an LS-120 floppy drive for data recovery: when DskImage was used with a regular floppy drive on my bad floppy with track 0 CRC error, it reported 30 sectors were unrecoverable; when I used the LS-120 floppy drive, DskImage reported 1 sector was unrecoverable. Once DskImage actually reported, with the bad floppy in the LS-120 drive, a perfect read with 0 sectors unrecoverable, but the disk image still contained lost clusters and lots of huge directories with illegal characters, so I don't quite trust the message "0 sectors were unrecoverable". Here a comparison between GRDuw v4.1.14 and DskImage v1.0: - DskImage can only read thru the BIOS while GRDuw can also use Absolute RW, a method which in my tests has produced more recovered files than using BIOS - DskImage can re-read a bad sector up to 10 times, while GRDUW seems to read a bad sector up to 15 times - nevertheless both programs achieved roughly the same data recovery results I tried DskImage under Windows XP SP2, because the docu file DskImage.txt states "DskImage works under DOS, Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and probably Windows XP". But what does "probably" mean? When I tried to recover under WinXP this bad floppy with track 0 error, everything seemed to work fine. But I couldn't write under WinXP the recovered disk image onto a floppy. Under Win98 I was eventually able to write the image to a floppy, after several frozen or hung systems. In Windows Explorer this recovered floppy didn't show any files, although there was hardly any free space on it. When I ran ScanDisk on the recovered floppy, the system froze. I then compared with Beyond Compare/HexViewer the floppies recovered with DskImage under Win98 and under WinXP: they were nearly identical, except that the disk image obtained under WinXP had just blanks around the area of the FAT. So "probably" could als be interpreted as "probably not". In any case, DskImage should be in the Win98 tool box for data recovery. @jaclaz: I have looked at FDImage, but it's for writing a floppy disk image, not for reading a bad floppy. Thanks anyway.

Converting DOS 2 boot floppies from 5.25" -> 3.5" media Thanks, dencorso, it worked fine on my old Inspiron 7500 laptop. I used DCF instead of DiskImage or WinImage. Under DOS 6.22 I pre-formatted a taped 1.44MB floppy disk with FDFormat: "FDFormat A: /4" Then, in a DOS window under Win98, I extracted with DCF on top of this pre-formatted floppy a .dcf image of the DOS 2.10 boot floppy, with the options: Format=OFF and Fast=ON. I tried to create a 360kB 3.5" boot floppy into IBM PC-DOS 2.00 (US) with WinImage instead of DCF (in a Win98 DOS window), but on my floppy drive WinImage canNOT write the floppy image onto a 3.5" 720kB floppy pre-formatted to 360kB. WinImage gives me the error message "Error. Disk error on track 1, head 0. Floppy Error". Apparently your floppy drive works better with WinImage than mine. GRDuw could not transfer the image onto preformatted 360kB 3.5" media either. GRDuw does not support the 360kB format, only 1.2MB for old 5.25" floppies. When I tried to transfer the 360kB image with GRDuw onto 3.5" media I get the error message: "The Disk Image file media type is not supported" So the only software tool that works with my floppy drive and which can transfer under Win98 the image of a DOS 2.x boot floppy onto 3.5" media is DCF.

All floppy recovery efforts were done with the original VFAT, NOT with the VFAT update.I had test-installed the VFAT.VxD official update after the iosys98 update and got a tremendous multiple-drive-letter problem: I had a SCSI Iomega Jaz drive connected via an Adaptec SlimSCSi 1460A PCCard in the PCMCIA slot. Instead of getting one icon in My Computer for the Jaz drive I got seven. A 2nd SCSI Jaz drive connected via a Jaz Traveller cable [= a SCSI to parallel converter] to the parallel port was unaffected and Ok, it showed up as an eighth icon. Restoring clean \Windows\ and \Program Files\ directories didn't help, I kept on getting these multiple drive letters, somehow unexplainable. Maybe something got stored in a hidden area of the Jaz drive. When I changed the SCSI ID on the Jaz drive from 7 to 6 plus repeated restoring a clean Windows, the multiple-drive-letter problem was miraculously gone. I never had seen 7 multiple Jaz icons before, and I prefer to stay away from this VFAT update. Windows is a huge pile of bugs: I installed this VFAT update, which was supposed to have something to do with the time-stamps of files, and I get a huge number of multiple jaz drive letters. Or, as I mentioned above, I connected to the internet with a WLAN PCCard, and the file-recovery with the floppy drive became poor. That's why I prefer a plain-vanilla Win98SE, with as few updates as possible.

Unofficial I/O Subsystem Drivers Fix 3 of my attempts to recover the bad floppy with CRC errors on track 0 were made on a plain-vanilla Win98SE system and 4 attempts on a plain-vanilla Win98SE system plus the Unofficial I/O Subsystem Drivers Fix (iosys98.exe) GRDuw plus an LS-120 floppy disk drive could recover without the iosys98 update 2/4/5 files in 3 attempts. With the iosys98 update they could recover 26/24/22/4 files in 4 attempts. It might have been just coincidence, but it appears that the iosys98 update may improve the data recovery capability of GRDuw plus an LS-120 floppy drive as drive A:. I have tested the iosys98 update quite a bit, it didn't cause any problems on my system. In any case it has a very good uninstall routine, in contrast for example to nusb. BTW, when I had the internet connected, via a USB 2.0 WLAN PCcard in a PCMCIA-slot, during a further recovery attempt with the iosys98 update, only 3 files were recovered.

Remainder of bad floppy recovered with ScanDisk GRDuw and the LS-120 floppy drive had recovered 26 good files with 513kB, but the 720kB floppy also contained files and directories with strange characters in their names and Windows Explorer reported using 10.9GB. I then: - created with GRDuw a .dcf image of the recovered floppy - created a work-copy of the recovered floppy (by writing the .dcf image to another floppy) - ran ScanDisk on the work-copy with the options Make copies of cross-linked files and Convert lost fragments to files - ScanDisk then recovered 9 more files from lost clusters, but they had filenames like "File0000.chk". I assume the lost clusters came about because parts of the control structures area, track 0, were bad. They were good data, but no index on track 0 was pointing to them. - I assigned correct filenames to these lost clusters (= good, not yet recovered files plus junk) by comparing them with Beyond Compare to backup versions - I manually removed with Beyond Compare the junk appended at the end of 7 ASCIIl files recovered by ScanDisk. The size of the recovered lost cluster files on the floppy, e.g. of File0000.chk, was a multiple of 1024 bytes. Anything between the last byte of the original file (e.g. byte 135.878 ) and the end of the lost cluster file (e.g. byte 136.192, a multiple of 1024) was junk to be removed. But you have to know where the original file ended. The ".chk" files recovered by ScanDisk did not have the original modifcation date of the file. The recovered and then cleaned files can be easily recognized by their much later modification dates. - 2 of the 9 files recovered by ScanDisk as .chk lost cluster files were non-ASCII files (compiled .QLB and .LIB, both 25.600 bytes). Since I could NOT with certainty identify the last byte of the original file/the appended junk I left these 2 files unmodified, with a maximum of 1kB of junk at the end. The recovered 720kB floppy has 35 files using 669kB. About 75% of the files (26 files using 513kB) were recovered by GRDuw. 1 file recovered by GRDuw had perfect content but had a modifcation date error ("4/11/90" instead of "4/11/91). The file modification date/time of all files recovered by GRDuw was increased by exactly 9 hours, e.g. "3/25/91 6:40:50 am" instead of "3/25/91 9:40:50 pm". This may be a bug of GRDuw, I have Pacific Time (GMT-8) on my laptop, or it may have something to do with the orignal files being created under DOS 5, but the recovery took place under Win98. The remaining 25% of the files, for which the index on track 0 was damaged, were recovered by ScanDisk plus manual modification. Manual cleanup was feasible only for the ASCII files, not for the 2 compiled files. I repeated the recovery altogether 7 times, on 2 different LS-120 drives, on a regular floppy drive, with and without the iosys98.exe unofficial Windows update, using AbsRW and BIOS as low-level disk modes, with basically identical results. I am confident that all files on the floppy were recovered and good (except for the junk at the end of the 2 compiled files) because the data area of the floppy was Ok, only track 0 was bad. I looked at all 33 ASCII files on the floppy, they all looked good. Thanks Grre-doff

Data recovery problem nearly solved I have achieved fantastic data recovery results using an LS-120 floppy drive together with GRDuw for Windows v4.1.14 (=GR Disk Utility, by Grosso, Roberto, for WinME/9x) to recover data from this bad floppy. It took about 6 minutes to recover probably 90% or more of the bad 720kB floppy. The GR Disk Utility recovered 26 good files, totaling 513kB. VGA-Copy, using only a regular floppy drive, recovered 6 good files with 377kB, taking over an hour. VGA-Copy, however, recovered the last chunk of a text file, which GR Disk Utility couldn't, otherwise the files recovered by VGA-Copy and GR Disk Utility were identical. With a regular floppy disk drive, however, GR Disk Utility is very slow and couldn't even recover a single sector of track 0 after my clicking for 10 minutes on Retry. LS-120 drives differ in their data recovery performance. One drive recovered 26 good files, totaling 513kB, another drive recovered only 17 files with 502kB. This bad little floppy disk actually can help me identify which one of my LS-120 drives is a particularly good reader. Using "AbsRW"as "Low level disk mode" gave much better results than using "BIOS"; I have not yet checked the IoCtrl mode. There is one other feature which I particularly like: GR Disk Utility is the only Win98 GUI utility which can write .dcf floppy image format. (It can read and write 3 formats: .dim, .dcf and .ima). If you own an LS-120 drive, the GR Disk Utility is an absolute must-have. I now appreciate my LS-120 floppy drives, which were sitting in a box for years, as magic data recovery drives for bad 3.5" floppies.

Data recovery problem One of my 720kB floppies to be archived has a very nasty CRC error in track 0. WinImage reports "Disk Error on track 0, head 0. Floppy Error". DCF gives the msg "Diskette bad. CRC read error" on Track 0. BadCopy is of no help either ("No file found in rescue Mode #1, you may try Mode #2", and under Mode#2 it recovered garbage into File1.EXE ). Similar story with EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard under WinXP. AnaDisk reports: Track 0, Side 0: Sector 8 data error, Sector 9 ID but no data found Track 0, Side 1: Sector 5 data error all other tracks were Ok Vga-Copy v5.3 was able to recover correctly, in a Win98 DOS window under SlowDown v1.01, with a regular 3.5" floppy disk drive, about 50% of the files on the floppy, with their correct file names and correct content. I had selected the maximum of 99 retries; Vga-Copy was then reading for about 45 minutes the bad and weak sectors of track 0. LS-120 floppy drives are much better at reading bad floppies than regular floppy drives. Vga-Copy unfortunately does not work with LS-120 floppy drives, it accesses the floppy controller directly. AnaDisk v2.10, DiskDupe v4.07, DCF v5.3, CopyQM v5 and WinDupe v1.02 don't work in a Win98 DOS window with an LS-120 floppy drive either. TeleDisk v2.23 allows to address the floppy controller either directly or via the BIOS, but TeleDisk doesn't work either in a Win98 DOS window. I would like to continue my data recovery with an LS-120 floppy drive because of its superior error correction. Which Win98 recovery software or sector-copier works with an LS-120 floppy drive and is actually able to recover floppies with a bad track 0?

Converting DOS 2 boot floppies from 5.25" -> 3.5" media Thanks, dencorso, it worked fine on my old Inspiron 7500 laptop. I used DCF instead of DiskImage or WinImage. Under DOS 6.22 I pre-formatted a taped 1.44MB floppy disk with FDFormat: "FDFormat A: /4" Then, in a DOS window under Win98, I extracted with DCF on top of this pre-formatted floppy a .dcf image of the DOS 2.10 boot floppy, with the options: Format=OFF and Fast=ON. I was able to boot from this special 3.5" floppy into DOS 2.10, both with my Inspiron 7500 laptop (2000) and with an older Toshiba T3200 (1987) Under Win98 the files on this specially-formatted 3.5" floppy displayed Ok, but I was not able to read from or to write to it without a blue screen + disk error msg. In any case, it's nice to know that one could boot into DOS 2.1 on a laptop without a 5.25" floppy drive, if ever the need came up.

Problem converting boot sectors to a different floppy format I have come across a little monster among the floppies to be archived: It is a 5.25" 360kB bootable floppy which boots into IBM DOS 2.00 (German) of 9-Aug-1983. I can create a 5.25" floppy image from it Ok, the 5.25" floppy re-created from the image file boots fine into IBM DOS 2.00 (German). But I cannot convert this 5.25" 360kB floppy image correctly to 3.5" 720kB format, so that I can boot into IBM DOS 2.00 (German) on my Inspiron 7500 laptop, which has only a 3.5" floppy drive (laptops don't come with 5.25" floppy drives). I have tried both WinImage under Win98 and the "Convert" selection of Disk Copy Plus under DOS 6.22. The converted 3.5" 720kB floppy does NOT boot anymore. When booting from the "converted" 3.5" floppy, I get the error message: " Falscher/fehl.Befehlsinterpreter" = "wrong/missing command interpreter". During the conversion of the floppy format, DCP displays that the orignal 5.25" 360kB floppy had 12 sectors used by the system, while the resulting 3.5" 720kB floppy has 14 sectors used by the system. WinImage does not display any conversion information. When I compared with Anadisk the original 5.25" floppy and the "converted" 3.5" floppy, there were 2 changes: - the media byte changed from "fd" to "f9" - the original 5.25" floppy had 2 sectors/FAT, while the "converted" 3.5" floppy had 3 sectors/FAT, which may explain why command.com could not be found. This little monster shows that one cannot trust the converted image files of bootable floppies created by WinImage or DCP. After conversion one should always test: does the converted floppy really boot? Both WinImage and DCF can write Ok without format conversion the 5.25" floppy onto a 3.5" floppy, but the trouble is that this non-standard floppy (i.e. a 3.5" floppy pretending to be a 5.25" floppy) boots fine on a Toshiba T3200 (80286), but when trying to boot from it on an Inspiron 7500 (Pentium 3), the system hangs during the boot process. Is there a tool which can properly convert the boot sector from a 5.25" floppy to a standard 3.5" floppy? P.S.: Same problem when booting with a 3.5" 720kB "IBM PC-DOS v2.10 (German)" floppy converted from 5.25" 360kB format (err msg: Fehler:DSKT,Platte/Kein System) Same problem when booting with a 3.5" 720kB "IBM PC-DOS v2.10 (US)" floppy converted from a 5.25" 180kB format (err msg: Non-System disk or disk error)

Thanks dencorso. With FDFormat I could format on an old Toshiba 3200 portable, under DOS 6.22, this rare SS-HD 5.25" floppy disk to 600kb (half the capacity of DS-HD 5.25" floppies), without using FDRead.I used the following parameters: FDFormat b: t80 h1 s15 c1 d224 No problems reading and writing under DOS 6.22 to the floppy disk formatted in this special format with the T3200. I could not test it under Win98, I am away from my dual-core desktop and don't have an external 5.25" floppy disk drive for my Inspiron 7500 laptop. This confirms my experience that I can read, write and format 96tpi CP/M formats onto a taped 1440kB 3.5" floppy, from a DOS window under Win98 using 22Disk, but not onto an untaped 1440kB floppy. The internal floppy drive of my Inspiron 7500 laptop works better with taped 1440kB floppies than with original 720kB floppies when I read/write/format CP/M formatted 3.5" floppy disks under Win98. I just unsuccessfully tried to create a floppy disk image with DCF 5.3 of this specially formatted 600kB floppy. At track 66 I got an error message "Address mark not found". FDFormat did something during the formatting which DCF didn't like. I then checked this 600kB SS floppy with Anadisk, which produced the following messages: " This diskette has a DOS format [i.e. not CP/M, for example] but is not a standard type." " This is a single-sided DOS format, but both sides have data. Do you want to check both sides?" This means that formatting a floppy as single-side format with FDFormat will not delete the data on the unused side - a potential security risk. Then Anadisk displays "Track 66: Sector 5, ID but no data found". This message appears when I checked only one side and when I checked both sides. Since both DCF and Anadisk found something strange at track 66 of this floppy formatted with FDFormat, I would be careful. In the best case using a non-standard DOS format means that you cannot create a .dcf floppy image for archiving the floppy. In the worst case it may signal a potential data loss problem. Maybe you should consider moving the stuff from non-standard formatted floppies to floppies with a standard DOS format.

Hi dencorso,Your MD2-HD 5.25" floppies are double-sided, but the floppy here is a single-sided one, I can't remember having seen one before. Thanks for mentioning FDFormat, but if I remember right, it requires the TSR FDRead to stay resident so that non-standard floppy formats can be read. I have kind of given up to format this floppy to more than 360kB, I'll just keep it as a curiosity. "Format b: /T:80 /N:15 /U" (it does the same as "Format b: /F:1.2") formatted it Ok to 1.2MB, but subject to the weakness identified by FMT 2.6. Apparently the "/1" parameter [=format one side only] doesn't work with 5.25" floppies, only with 3.5" floppies. I have tried to test-format this 5.25" SS floppy with 22Disk to CP/M DEC Rainbow format (SS:DD:96tpi:5.25inch), but my max.1.2MB 5.25" floppy disk drive couldn't do it, just error messages. BTW, when I formatted a 3.5" floppy disk in a Win98 Dos window to this specific CP/M format, everything was Ok. No problem writing under Win98 files from the HDD to this CP/M floppy disk in the floppy drive of my Inspiron laptop, and then reading the CP/M floppy on another Win98 computer. Data files, however, get changed a little in the process of transferring from DOS format -> CP/M format -> DOS format: a whole bunch of Hex 1A characters (up to 40 maybe) gets appended to the end of a file. And then there is a little trick: only use 720kB 3.5" floppy disks for reading and writing in CP/M format under Win98, 1.44MB floppies don't work.

Among the archived floppies, which I am re-formatting, I have come across a 5.25" floppy disk, marked as follows: "BASF 1/96 96 tpi certified one sided/double density sectors soft FlexyDisk 5.25" "Many CP/M computers and some early IBM PC like computers used 80 track (96 TPI) 5.25 inch drives with double density format. This was sometimes called "quad density", as it was twice the data capacity of "double density" 40-track (48 TPI) drives. These drives, 40 or 80 track, rotated disks at 300 RPM. Later on, the PC compatibles went to "high density" 1.2M 5.25" drives and diskettes, with drives which were able to run at 360 RPM." http://retrotechnology.net/herbs_stuff/drive.html "If you do have any quad density disks, you can use them as good quality double density disks." http://www.britishtelephones.com/floppy1.htm "Format b: /1 /4 /u" formats the floppy Ok to 180K, but that's very little for a 96tpi floppy disk "Format b: /F:1.2 /u" formats the floppy Ok to 1.2MB, but with FMT v2.6 of the Disk Copy Plus utilites I got a bad sector (" 1 tries failed" [DOS format tries 3 times, therefore no bad sectors; FMT v2.6 marks the sector bad after only 1 try fails]). The 2nd side of the floppy is a little weak. With which DOS format parameters should this floppy be formatted on a 5.25" max.1.2MB floppy drive? Are there any special uses for this rare type of floppy disk?

Maybe it's Windows Explorer under Win9x, not USB, that is causing the problems. The problem of the sluggish file deletes with Win98 Explorer shows that it is seriously flawed.For moving files, I try not to use Windows Explorer under Win98; I am using Beyond Compare instead, or I boot into WinXP to do the file moves there with WinXP Explorer, but this has lead in a few rare instances to filename problems between Win98 and WinXP, for files containing some foreign characters (e.g. mp3s downloaded with eMule). Also, Win9x Explorer sometimes cannot delete some illegal files, I have to go into WinXP to delete them. I have also experienced under Win98SE blue screens and data loss, but only with my older Inspiron laptops, not with my dual-core desktops, when I had 2 external 1TB HDDs connected to the laptop and tried to move data between the two USB HDDs, even with Beyond Compare. Moving data between a USB HDD and the internal HDD is fine under Win98SE, only moving data between 2 USB drives may lead to data loss, if I transfer more than maybe 100 or 500MB. There is no data loss/blue screen under Win98SE if I transfer just small amounts of data. When I compare/update/synchronize 2 USB HDDs used for backup, I do it under WinXP, under Win98 is too risky. Maybe 6 months ago I had a major disaster with file moves under Win98, when both the source and the destination got damaged, with a blue screen. Because files on the source drive got damaged, I didn't know anymore how reliable the source was. I was lucky that I had a quite current, clean 3rd backup. I copied a couple of files from the damaged source, then deleted and recreated the damaged 192GB partiton on the source and destination HDDs. I had some data loss plus time wasted restoring about 2x150GB of data on the source and destination USB HDDs.

Excellent. The man should have paid with a credit card or a check, so that the U.S. government knows how he is spending his money. People paying cash in the U.S. might have something to hide, might be potential criminals. The U.S. is on its way to a totalitarian democracy, with police gone haywire: Just on a single day, on August 14, Bob Dylan was arrested for walking suspiciously in a street, and India's most popular actor Shah Rukh Khan was detained and questioned for 3 hours when arriving in the U.S. While I was archiving some older CP/M floppies, I come across an interesting aspect of CP/M: CP/M files have no modification etc. dates. With DOS the totalitarian surveillance of the individual began: file dates, index.dat files, cookies, spyware, software calling home, and who knows what else. Win98 has a much smaller dose of all that than WinXP, Vista or Windows 7. In a couple of years Windows 98 may become a luxury like a Swiss bank account. But also, somebody browsing then the internet with Win98 might raise suspicions with U.S. surveillance.

I have now archived most of my 5.25" CP/M floppy disks twice, once as a file-copy with 22Disk v1.44, and another time with TeleDisk (which can under DOS create and restore an image file of a CP/M floppy).I have compared the floppies re-created from .td0 (=TeleDisk) image files against the original HP-125 format CP/M floppies, and they appear to be identical. The test included a CP/M floppy disk with: - 3 user areas (user0, user1, and user2), - user1 contained the HP-125 start-up files for CP/M; 2 CP/M file names contained small characters, illegal under DOS ("welcome.com", DOS recognizes only "WELCOME.COM") TeleDisk works fine for creating and restoring image files of my HP-125 CP/M floppies. After having archived about half of my CP/M floppies with TeleDisk, I came across www.hpmuseum.net which is providing downloadable .td0 floppy disk images of HP-125 CP/M software I initially felt content that I had independently chosen the same floppy-disk-imaging software. But then, on their excellent page about Re-Creating Archived Software I found that they had used old version 2.11 for 5.25" floppies and old version 2.16 for 3.5" floppies - but I had used a different version. And on each download page hpmuseum indicated which version of TeleDisk was used Then I came across an article by Dave Dunfield, stating "Teledisk also has a reputation for having compatibility issues between versions, and with different PC hardware. To help you try and recover any .TD0 images that you encounter, I have collected all of the shareware versions of Teledisk that I have been able to find and placed them here." (9 different versions for download) Here is another discussion about an 8 inch floppy drive: "my TELEDISK version is 2.12. I think, that TELEDISK reads only 18 sectors and copies these sectors back again. That's why there is no error message... THANKS, Teledisk v2.15 works! v2.16 has some problems with the last three tracks." Which version of TeleDisk to use? The TeleDisk versions up to and including v2.16 are shareware. They can be downloaded, but not registered/purchased. The newer versions can be purchased only by the U.S. government ("GSA") Dave Dunfield has developed the freeware ImageDisk which can handle .td0 files. Google indicates the existence of a v2.23: "I have a version of Teledisk that reports as "v2.23TUL" , and have no idea where it came from, nor can I find any reference to it. Is far as I can remember, I've never seen it mentioned. Any idea as to its provenance?" ..."I would like to have a copy! Just to look what it is." - but that was the end of the thread. v2.23 of Oct.1995, in contrast to the earlier shareware versions (v2.16 is of Sept.1993), apparently includes an uninstall program which makes sure that old outdated versions of TeleDisk are deleted. As tested, .td0 files created by v2.23 are apparently handled fine by older v2.11. New Technologies Inc. now owns the rights to TeleDisk and AnaDisk, another former Sydex product. This company may have some special customers: "the CIA is especially desperate for technical talent, according to Mike Anderson, president and CEO of New Technologies Inc.,... The government's intelligence community is NTI's largest client." http://www.gantthead.com/articles/articles...t.cfm?ID=221640 The product page of New Technologies Inc (NTI) has as description of Anadisk, a sibling of TeleDisk, "A highly specialized floppy diskette analysis tool for use in security reviews and to identify data storage pattern anomalies, e.g., the Hanssen epionage case involved floppy diskettes with unique formatting." The spying activities of Robert Hanssen "have been described as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history"". The most detailed article about TeleDisk is by Will Kranz in which he refers to TDCVRT by Sergey Erokhin. TDCVRT works fine converting .td0 to .fdi (when you double-click on a DOS [not CP/M] .fdi floppy disk image file, it will open up fine in WinImage). Will Kranz also mentions in his article an email from Sergey Erokhin (public email address: greatmao /at/ yahoo.com, surely not an old communist, in which Sergey Erokhin recommended the CIA factbook for information about the Ukraine. The buzz word CIA may ring a bell: Couldn't it be that the U.S. government has been archiving their old secret floppies with Teledisk, and doesn't want anybody else to have access to newer/better versions of TeleDisk? That could explain why TeleDisk isn't for sale any more. And wouldn't the KGB, or whatever they are called now, be interested in reading/accessing/converting images of secret U.S. floppies? These purely hypothetical speculations plus the use of TeleDisk by hpmuseum.net seem to confirm that TeleDisk is the tool of choice for creating images of CP/M floppy disks. v2.23 also runs under Win98 in a DOS window.

It depends on the length of the recession, if it lasts 5 more years I could imagine the possibility of Chapter 11 for MS. This might give the next push to innovate, with companies not wanting to depend on the technology of a hypothetically troubled company. The current recession started with a big surprise, Bear Stearns, and might end with another big surprise, MS. And that might not be bad: with the decline of the near-monopolist IBM in the 80s a new cycle of economic expansion started, which ended with the dot-com bubble.

good article. "the situation is, it's surprisingly difficult to get enterprises to upgrade. Many companies have old software... " Microsoft may just have trouble selling their new products. I personally don't need new bells and whistles. The whole thing of a new browser being pushed reminds me of a conversation I had 30 years ago in a bar with an IBM salesman. "And then I had to sell this EDP guy a new computer, I needed a new Mercedes".

Not in my case, I have had the problem with the 720kB floppies on another near-identical laptop also. I beg to disagree. It is a 720bK media specific problem, see my hypothesis below Thanks, you got the solution to the problem: The manufacturers probably made 1440kB floppies out of the good/1st choice batches, and the 720kB floppies were made from the not-so-good/2nd choice quality, as they do with CPUs today.I tested the eight 720kB floppies which I had recovered from the trash bin: . 3 of them had bad sectors when I formatted them with the very sensitive FMT program (in the Disk Copy Plus package) on a 720kB-only drive, 5 were Ok . these remaining five floppies I reformatted under DOS 6.22 with DOS Format on a 720/1440kB floppy drive: 3 had bad sectors, 2 were ok . these two remaining floppies I reformatted under Win98 with Windows Format on a 720/1440kB floppy drive: one had bad sectors, one was Ok . this lone "good" 720kB floppy I put back into the trash, because it had bad sectors several days ago and I don't want to risk data loss or a hung computer when using it I tested it: the Mule has NO stability problems under Win98 when downloading and moving files at the same time, from a taped 1440=720kB floppy disk, or when formatting such a taped floppy. When using a normal 720kB floppy instead, the mule freezes. The freezing problem of the mule was most likely caused by the poor quality of 720kB media in general. BTW the mule is a great tool for identifying causes of system instability under Win98. The question is: For how long will revived defective floppies stay fine? WinDupe v1.02, for example, can format bad floppies, even those which DiskDupe or VGACopy could not format, with it you can manually force as often as you like to reformat a bad/weak sector. But this is not a wise thing to do: it's better to throw out any potentially bad floppies, before data is lost or time is wasted with recovery efforts.My currently preferred floppy formatting program is FMT v2.6 by Chang Ping Lee (in the DCP package). It does the opposite: it identifies weak floppies during the formatting, so that they can be discarded in time. "Conventionally, a cluster is marked as bad cluster if the formatting program fails to access after three tries. FMT, however, adopts a more strict policy to ensure that your valuable data won't be saved on places which are bad or about to turn bad. FMT will try three times too. The difference is that if FMT fails to access a sector in the first try it will mark the sector bad and tell you how many tries has failed." http://www.programmersheaven.com/download/.../8/ZipView.aspx

Hi jaclaz, thanks for the tip about taping the left hole of the 1.44MB floppies. The 1.44MB floppies taped in this way format fine as 720kb with Win98 format, no need to format in a DOS window or under DOS. I like your comment in the link above "I do have some three or four boxes of them [720kb floppies] (used), like vintage wine, to be used only on special occasions...." - and I have been throwing 50% of them into the trash. But my experience with the 720 kB floppies - after archiving them and then reformatting them for re-use - has been that about 50% of them re-formated with bad sectors on my 720/1140 kB floppy drive. I looked into my trash, the discarded weak 720kB floppies were 3M, IBM, Fuji Film, Verbatim DataLife and unmarked floppies with original software, so the problem of the 720kB floppies cannot be due to the brand. I was able to read/archive all the data on them, but when I reformatted the 720kB floppies on my old Inspiron 7500 laptop, which can read AND write to 720 and 1440kb floppy disk, 50% of them had bad sectors. Just try it yourself. Many more recent 3.5" floppy drives canNOT read 720kB floppies anymore, esp. external USB floppy drives. I have several external USB Buslink 3.5" floppy drives, they can read 720kB floppies, but the cannot write/format 720kB floppies. Although the internal 3.5" floppy drive of my Inspiron 7500 can read/write/format 720 and 1440 kB floppies, it has serious issues with 720kB floppies: The system hangs very of often when I move (not when I copy) stuff from 720kB floppies to the HDD. There is one repeatable error: when I have eMule running and start to move files from a 720kB floppy to the HDD, the system freezes. I will check whether taped 1440kB floppies seen by Windows as 720kB floppies also cause the mule to freeze. Addendum: I created with WinImage a disk image from the same bad floppy mentioned above, encountering a lot of read errors, but WinImage - in contrast to DCF - could create the disk image without the use of physical force. So WinImage is better suited for recovering unreadable bad floppy disks than DCF, on a Win98 machine. I liked the 'Ignore' selection of WinImage when it encounters a bad track. The bad floppy mentioned was recovered fine by WinImage, even if it was made to ignore the last 3 bad tracks. I also have 4 old 3.5" HP floppy disks to be archived, but they are single-sided, with an Auto Shutter (you can 'pinch' at the left corner of the floppy to release/re-attach the metal slider; the floppy has no write-protect hole). They are most likely from a 1985 HP-150 "Touch-screen", which I never liked. http://hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?swc=5 "The main problem at the time was that IBM machines did not use or recognise 3.5 inch floppy discs. Data files created on the 150 could be read by IBM PCs after the file had been stored to 5.25 inch floppy disc." Anadisk shows SS-DD, 256 bytes sector size, but when trying to copy, Anadisk stops reading when it comes to the blank tracks at the end; TeleDisk gives up on track 0. Any ideas on how to archive/read/convert this floppy?

1) Archiving: Using DCF to recover unreadable bad floppy disks I had some really bad disks among my floppy disks to be archived, Windows Explorer under Win98 would stop file-copying with the message: "Cannot copy xxx. The system cannot read from the specified device." I just recovered a particularly recalcitrant bad floppy disk with DCF v5.3 in a full-size DOS window under Win98. When DCF displayed the error message "Diskette bad CRC read error" I clicked on Retry, up to 20 times. When that didn't work I ejected the bad floppy disk, hit it, bent it, put it for 5 minutes into the freezer, and then back into the floppy drive, where DCF would continue with the bad track. After such physical force DCF would read another couple of tracks, and then the bad floppy had to get its treatment again. During the recovery process the bad floppy got physically stuck in the floppy drive, and I could only remove the bad floppy disk by inserting a knife into the floppy drive. The metal slider of the bad floppy disk became quite bent in the process, but at least I could take it out of the floppy drive. I then broke off the bent metal slider of the bad floppy disk, the metal slider is not needed for reading the bad floppy, works fine without it. After about 1 hour I had created with DCF a perfect floppy disk image. I repeated reading the bad floppy with DCF on another computer, with the same procedure. DCF got stuck at the same tracks, which showed that the read errors were not caused by a dirty floppy disk drive. The image files of the bad floppy, created on the 2 computers by DCF, were identical and good. The data was perfectly recovered. 2) 720kB floppies are often very bad media Of about 1000 old floppies in the process of being archived (the 3.5" floppies are 10-18 years old, the 5.25" floppies 15-27 years), the 720kB 3.5" floppies were really bad media. If anybody still has stuff on 720kB 3.5" floppies he should immediately archive them with a 720kB-only floppy drive. Newer floppy drives, which can read 1440 and 720 kB floppies, are made for narrower tracks and could NOT read maybe 30% of my good 720kB floppy disks. After archiving, I threw out about 50% of my 720kB floppies disks because they formatted with bad sectors on a 1440/720kB floppy drive, even if they formatted fine on an old 720kB-only drive. When re-using (reading or writing) a 720kB floppy disk in a 1440/720kB floppy drive, it should be formatted on a 1440/720 kb floppy drive, not on a 720kb-only floppy drive (different track width). BTW, WinXP Explorer cannot format 720kB floppies anymore, although 720kB floppies are read Ok under WinXP. My old 5.25" floppy disks (many 25 years old, both CP/M and DOS) gave me NO problems archiving. These old 5.25" floppies seem to be of archival quality, even el-cheapo no-name single-sided, double-density floppies which were formatted as double-sided, double-density floppies. I archived my 360kB 5.25" floppies with an old max-360kb floppy drive, not with a floppy drive which can handle 360kB and 1.2MB 5.25" floppy disks. The 5.25" floppy disks got their unjustified reputation as being unreliable media possibly because people used 360kB floppies, originally formatted in a 360kb-only drive, in a 360kB/1.2MB floppy drive.