Sonic underwater adventure rescue

[Buyatari]

I got a nice little package in the mail today. Huge folder with all kinds of great pieces of videogame development. No software just papers. I sorted a bit and then jumped in the tub after a hard days work.

 

Wait till I get out out of the tub to finish looking thru the stash you say. Not me! I gotta see it now !

 

Into the tub it falls.....What the hell is this a floopy disc?!?!? That wasn't supposed to be in here.

 

I grab it quick but not quick enough. Good thing I spent a hard day at work and not a long day at the buffet or it would have been the toilet not the tub I say to myself.

 

Then I look at the 3.5 inch floppy disc.

 

"Sonic the Hedgehog"

 

Ohh shit I wonder if this was important!

 

So it is soaked. I tried it in the PC but no good the inner lining is wet and it must be sticking. Any ideas or should I just flush it!

 

I posted one other forum. I figure if no one on either forum can save it then Sonic is off to swim with the fishes.

[jbanes]

Give it some time to dry, then try reading it with your best floppy drive. Floppy disks tended to be pretty hardy when it came to moisture. (I spoke with a guy who used to hide a disk in a small brook. He'd just set it out to dry for a few hours and it would work fine.) Just don't do anything like use a hairdryer on it. That will most certainly damage the disk.

 

Of course, if the disk is one of the more recent floppy disks (pretty much anything after 1996), it may have already been toast. Most of those floppies were so cheap that they would fail on their first write.

 

That being said, if the floppy turns out to have contained a working prototype of Sonic X-treme, I'm hanging you up by your pinky toe.

[nathanallan]

yeah, just let it dry out, it oughta work if it was gonna work at all. There are also disk rescue utilities you can find online if it has a few bad tracks from just being old.

 

I just googled floppy recovery free and got lots and lots of hits. So if there are any problems, you can try one of those if it gives you problems after it dries out.

[Buyatari]

Ok here is the disc. As you can (or can't I dunno) see the lining is wet and after I tried to read it in the drive it now sticks out. Should I try and yank the rest out?

 

[Buyatari]

Ok I figured out how to make the pics larger.

 

 

[nathanallan]

whoa. Okay, you may have to perform surgery on this one since the liner is sticking out. The crack apart pretty easy, but get a razor knife just in case you have to cut the case open. The lining is there for lots of reasons, so you'll want to run it with it in, DON'T yank the rest of it out. That will likely scratch the disk up then less chance of recovering it. You may want to take the actual disk out and transplant it into another shell. But for real, let it all dry out first.

 

/edit Wouldn't it be cool to find out if Sega was experimenting with a floppy disk based console at one time? The homebrew possibilities would be endless-- probably why no one did it.

Edited April 16, 2008 by nathanallan

[Buyatari]

whoa. Okay, you may have to perform surgery on this one since the liner is sticking out. The crack apart pretty easy, but get a razor knife just in case you have to cut the case open. The lining is there for lots of reasons, so you'll want to run it with it in, DON'T yank the rest of it out. That will likely scratch the disk up then less chance of recovering it. You may want to take the actual disk out and transplant it into another shell. But for real, let it all dry out first.

 

/edit Wouldn't it be cool to find out if Sega was experimenting with a floppy disk based console at one time? The homebrew possibilities would be endless-- probably why no one did it.

 

Thanks for the tips. I left it alone. Someone offered me $50 as is, so thats what I'm gunna do. I'm sure he will post his findings over on assemblergames if you are curious.