I recently moved all my computer related hardware into another room. In the process of doing this I found my old ZX Spectrum.
I also found the left overs from my IBM, it's Reference Diskette. So of course I attempted to read the disk with windows, no joy.
With a careful eye I looked over the hex dump of the disks sectors, and low and behold as soon as I reached sector 26 I get a
CRC Error aka Bad Sector. This sector seems to be in the middle of the FAT table, so this explains why windows was getting pissy.
Determined not to let that stop me I re-jigged an old floppy cloning program I created to also let me know the details of the bad sectors.
So now I have a disk image and a list of Bad Sectors, time for me to get to work. I had two images of the disk during my programming so
I checked the differences and the latter one seemed to have more Bad Sectors. This cant be good, either my drive is wrecking the disk or
the disk itself, being so old is deteriorating. Since my first image had no Bad Sector list I used my favourite hex editor
Hex Workshop (more news about this to come) to merge the two files and to create one with minimal Bad Sectors.
So here is the Disk Image and Bad Sector List. I am going to attempt to repair the image and see if we can get a working disk from 1987.
Download Disk Image File
Click To Enlarge
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| # | Image Offset | Disk Sector Number |
| 1 | 0x00003400 | 26 |
| 2 | 0x00007C00 | 62 |
| 3 | 0x0000C400 | 98 |
| 4 | 0x0013DE00 | 2543 |
Napalm
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