[Coco] DriveWire success... and some questions

[Joel DeYoung]

I received my DriveWire and HDB-DOS chip from Cloud 9 a few days ago and am
happy to report I was able to use them successfully to hook up my CoCo 3 to
my Mac via USB.

My CoCo stuff had been packed away for many years and I didn't think it was
realistic at all to expect the floppies to read.  But most of them did so I
got hooked up with DriveWire to be able to back everything up.  Seeing all
the old stuff I did so many years ago brought back a lot of great memories.
I work in the video game business now and started out as a programmer.
Working on the CoCo as a kid was what got me started with computers so this
stuff is pretty important to me (even if my BASIC code looks pretty
atrocious with the benefit of hindsight!).

Thanks to Mark and Boisy at Cloud 9 for creating these products, keeping
things going on the CoCo after all these years!  Kudos!

I have a couple of questions about reading floppies.  A couple of them have
IO errors.  It seems the BACKUP command won't work if any IO error is
encountered.  So in one case the directory was intact so I was able to copy
files one at a time, and only miss the ones that are corrupt or unreadable.
My question is are there any programs which attempt low level reads to
recover data from corrupt floppies?

Second, I have a few commercial floppies which defy using BACKUP.  I think
this may be due to come copy protection scheme since the discs read just
fine.  The discs in question are Bugs II by Four Star Software and Gantelet
II by Diecom Products.  Anyone have experience with this?

I'm happy to be back using my CoCos!

Cheers,
Joel