Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

A friend of mine has some Apple][ disks she’d like to read – does anyone have the necessary equipment to do it? Or some clues as to a good way of retrieving the data.
(I assume they’re 5.25 single density, but I’ve asked her to fax a copy over just in case…)


Categories: Memories.

/ 6 Comments

6 comments

    • neilh

      DSDD is 40track…shows how much I remember doesn’t it? I thought that was 80track, but then I might be thinking of 3.5 drives.

      istr the difference between Apple format and PC format was something to do with 8 sector or 9 sector per track – which fits with the softsector spec, and with not being able to read, even with low level reads, on a PC drive. But this memory is probably subject some kind of bitrot.

      Reply
    • neilh

      Got a small stack of 5.25 drives here, but haven’t thought in detail about what that kind of program would look like – might be worth digging out my DOS Internals book, see if I can write something that’ll use the INT16 BIOS hook.

      Reply
    • neilh

      If only it were a *Mac* problem there’d be no problem…these are the predecessors to the Mac (indeed two generations before – the Lisa never really took off).

      And its an interesting technical challenge, rather than necessarily actually being a useful thing to do.

      Reply

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