I DESTROYED my childhood floppy...

[Probabilitydragon]

Some more of my Atari stuff - floppy disks and tapes were recently discovered at the attic of a relative...

 

I started to explore a floppy and found some basic programs that I had written as a kid back in the good old days.

 

I ran one of the programs and heard disk I/O sounds on my CRT speaker. I aborted the program as I was not sure what it was doing. Then I listed it and apparently it was a program to write some data on the disk, connected to a program I was working on to help calculate attacks in pen-and-paper RPG Rolemaster with the aid of my computer. I ran the program once more to see what it does, and it apparently wrote a file on the disk.

 

However going back to DOS 3 (one of the disks had that), the file index seems to be corrupt. I assume it is because I ran the writing program and aborted it. Now I can't load any of the BAS programs and can't read what's on the disk. That sucks as there were some childhood treasures in there. 

 

Are the files lost forever or is there a way to rescue them?

 

I was using an 800XL and a 1050 disk drive, and the Master Diskette 3 supplied with it.

[invisible kid]

You will either need to send the disk to someone, or take an image of disk(ATR) with sio2pc/sio2usb or some other way of transferring. If it can be salvaged, the folks here will be able to help. I hope you meet success.

[Probabilitydragon]

I'll start a project to make an ATR of the disk, might take some time with my skills & being busy with work though... the communication channel between my mac and my Ataris has been my AVGcart with SIO and the SD card, but am I correct in assuming that it's not possible to put the ATR on the SD card so that it could be read by the mac?

[+nasty niff]

maybe able to rewrite the table of contents with a disk editor,

will take a while finding the start of the programs tho..

Edited July 26, 2022 by mistapaul

[Rybags]

You'd be wanting to create a raw entire copy of the disk to ATR since the file structure + allocation map is probably corrupt or wrong.

 

DOS 2.x is fairly easy to do file recovery on, not sure about 3.0.  It never really caught on so wasn't in common use and few utilities were created targetting it.

[xrbrevin]

theres also kyroflux or greaseweazle if other options are not successful

[Mrshoujo]

I'm surprised Bob Puff's Disk Communicator file format never became a defacto standard for disk images.