Horrible mistake with my Amiga gear

[Techx]

Well this is a sad day for me.. I've been lugging around my a1200 and several hundreds of floppies with me since my Amiga was my primary computer back in the early 90's... Several years ago I did transfer all of the files off of my 245MB hard drive to a compact flash card and was happy that information was safe. So recently I started getting interested in a new project to look at all of my old Amiga floppies and to salvage as much as I could off of them. I figured that 15-20 years later that these disks may be fully corrupted but some of them should be ok since they were stored in a good environment. So I pulled out my boxes of Amiga disks from my closet and laid them next to my desk, where they sat for a week. After the week when I went back to start looking at them I realized a horrible thing. I had put them ON TOP of and right next to my new Logitech z-5500 subwoofer. AHHHH!!!!!!!! It's been so long since I have had to deal with such fragile magnetic media, I totally forgot that the very powerful magnet in that subwoofer was capable of wiping out all information on my floppies. And tonight I finally verified that it is true. Every disk I put in shows up 'DF0:?' .... So sad, I had lots and lots of games, apps, texts, and personally made graphics and music on them... I'm mad I make such a dumb mistake... anyway, thanks for listening.. by the way, I wonder if there is any amiga utility that can try to recover deleted data from disks, maybe I could salvage something from them.. I searched aminet but could not find anything

-Tim

[Matt_H]

Hmmm... something that could salvage disks... a "disk-salvager", if you will... perhaps, DiskSalv? :-)

Sorry to hear about your trouble, I know how you feel - I recently discovered that one of my "safe" backups to hard disk was actually corrupt and that the original media had decayed into uselessness in the interim. Extremely frustrating.

Good luck with DiskSalv. I've had mixed results for corrupt disk recovery.

[amigadave]

Sad story!

I have hundreds of floppies as well, but have found that more than 80% are still readable, but some percentage more have errors.

Good luck finding a program to salvage some of the information, I am sure there must be several Amiga programs for such work, but they were intended for disks erased in a floppy drive, not in front of a massive sub-woofer.

Try Aminet.

Edit:  Funny one Matt_H, I wish I had thought of that!

[A4000_Mad]

Sorry to read your story :-(

I have had great success with Quarterback Tools on floppy disks. But this is for finding/fixing checksum errors, bad blocks and files. I don't think it could help with a disk that has been wiped by a magnetic field.

[ddniUK]

I have had df0:? often.

It wasnt the disks, but the drive that was bad....

[Hodgkinson]

Awwwwwwww...

We were scrapping CD drives to try out the lasers in them the other day and I had to warn my dad about the motor that he'd put on top of his "Ghost" floppy. Hmmm. That disk needs testing some time ;-)

[da9000]

I'm with ddniUK: my bet is that it's 100% a drive problem.

I've intentionally tried to wipe data off disks with magnets and it doesn't really work that well. Don't forget the power of the magnet diminishes by the square of the distance, and usually the magnet is quite far from the enclosing box.

[Boot_WB]

da9000 wrote:
I'm with ddniUK: my bet is that it's 100% a drive problem.

I've intentionally tried to wipe data off disks with magnets and it doesn't really work that well. Don't forget the power of the magnet diminishes by the square of the distance, and usually the magnet is quite far from the enclosing box.

Cube, not square. Except in the very local area of the magnet where it is dependent on shape. I hate referencing Wikipedia, but...
[/nerd]

[tokyoracer]

Monitors can also be nasty. I found out they dont like heat much either (wasn't clever and wasnt thinking). A big re-formatting session is in order I reckon.

[Bonami]

Hi Techx,
I understand totally how you feel, becoz i've suffered numerous episodes of frustration with amiga diskettes failure....
In your case, there're three possibilities:
i- the magnetic field had indeed caused damage as you yourself reckoned;
ii- most of the disks had already gone bad since they were left in closet for years;
iii- the disk drive in your A1200 is no longer mechanically sound since it's been left unused for long time, as suggested by ddniUK.

You can try a disk cleaner kit to clean the read/write head of the drive; failing that, buy a new disk drive.

For me, 90% of my diskettes are corrupted by fungus (due to the warm & moist air in the tropical land where i live)
I recently managed to salvage some endeared disks by painstakingly wiping out the fungus with cotton swaps + alchohol... Hours of work over several weekends.

[DBAlex]

Id go with option III, the disk is bad, I had to replace my drive in my A1200 becuase it had just broken after being laying around for ages... works perfectly with the new drive though!  :-)

[Ilwrath]

In your case, there're three possibilities:
i- the magnetic field had indeed caused damage as you yourself reckoned;
ii- most of the disks had already gone bad since they were left in closet for years;
iii- the disk drive in your A1200 is no longer mechanically sound since it's been left unused for long time, as suggested by ddniUK.

There's always another option:
iv- you're dealing with an old-school virus, and you just applied it to the rest of your disks...  viruses don't just magically die off when you store disks.  Its rare that I'll go through a stack of old disks without something unexpected being on one.