[Coco] Disk recovery from I/O ERRORs

[Allen Huffman]

Does anyone know of a tool that will try to recover as many files as possible from a corrupted floppy disk? As you may recall, the BACKUP command will abort on an I/O error.

I have been using two approaches so far:

1. Manual sector copies, skipping errors (BASIC program I wrote, using ONERR and DSKI$/DSKO$).

2. File copy. Sometimes the corrupting isn't even in a file, so I wrote a BASIC program to run through the directory and do a manual COPY of each file, skipping bad ones.

But, one disk actually corrupted between DIRs and crashed a sector in the directory (four entries, I think?). The data to those files may still be on the disk, but I don't think there would be any easy way to reconstruct it.

I was quite a pro at repairing crashed OS-9 hard drives using disk editors and the technical reference manual, but I never did anything with RS-DOS.

		-- Allen