getting info from old disks

[jeffisme]

hi, I must have been one of the original Amiga owners back in the 1980s and had pretty much every Amiga up through I think it was the 4000 (what a great computer that was).

I wrote a book on that computer and that's my question. If I remember correctly, I wrote it on WordPerfect. I saved the chapter disks (but not the wordperfect disk) and put them away. Recently, I had an offer to republish the book but when I took the disks out and put them in a 500, all of them came up DF0:bad on the Workbench screen. I had some Mac disks in there and they show up fine on my Mac. I just can't believe that every single one of the amiga disks has gone bad. They were all kept in a clean, dry box.

Or am I just missing something? Do I need to find and load a wordperfect disk first? do disks created on a 4000 not read on a 500? Is there any way to pull the files off these disks even with the df0:bad reading?

thanks for any information,

jeffk

[TCMSLP]

Hi Jeff,

I suspect your A500 floppy drive is having problems;  The disks are probably good.

I'd find another local Amiga user and sort something out between you - I'd not risk the disks in the post.


Steve

Edit: Do any of your Amiga disks read ok?  If not, it's almost certainly the drive...

[jeffisme]

I was thinking that. but here's the story: I bought the computer off ebay just for this purpose. when I started it up, the workbench disk he sent wouldn't work. He then sent another, and it worked fine. He also sent something called "firepower," which I didn't start but did insert into the drive as a kind of test, and the computer read that as well.

if the drive was bad, wouldn't it not be able to read any of those disks that he sent?

[ChaosLord]

The solution is simple:
Copy a fresh copy of your book off of your A4000 hard drive. :idea:

Hard drives don't rot the way floppies do.

I have around 4000 floppies and 99% of them died
Even the ones in a plastic disk protector inside a sealed box inside another sealed box.

[jeffisme]

Alas, the drive and the computer are long gone.
I'm just puzzled why all my Mac floppies in the same box and the same year work fine. I guess that's why I was hopeful it wasn't the disks but the computer.

[faki]

Floppy drive on A4000 is HD, while A500 drive is DD. Maybe is that your problem?

[PanterHZ]

Another reason for your problems can be that the floppy disks were  originally formatted with FastFileSystem. If your A500 is a standard  version, it will have kickstart 1.3 installed, and if this the case, the  problem will be that it can't by default read FFS formatted disks.
The  solution is to add a new entry in the Devs/Mountlist file found on your  Workbench disk, where it uses FastFileSystem instead of OldFileSystem.

I found this old thread with more info regarding this: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=7630

[ddniUK]

If you saved the files using your A4000 which had a high density drive, then there is no way that a standard density drive can read them. Post this question on English Amiga Board for some extra help. eab.abime.net