[NLRS] WA2VOI DISASTER

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

On Sat, 2007-06-30 at 02:00 +0100, Donn Baker wrote:
> 
> Well, maybe a bit over dramatic, but still....
> 
> I had a TOTAL disk crash over night Jun 27-Jun28.  This included, of
> course, my mail and address book. 
> 
> Basically, if you sent me mail yesterday and I didn't acknowledge it, most
> likely its gone forever.  If it was (is) important, please re-send.  Sorry.
> 
> Anyone know of some place that does data recovery from dead disks ?
> 
> 73 Donn
> WA2VOI/0

The hard drive on my packet computer (very modern for 1985, 386SX16, 40
MB hard drive) failed this spring. I wrote a simple C program for DOS
that read a character at a time and if there was a read error it paused
10 milliseconds and tried again with a retry limit of 65,000 tries. It
took three days to copy all of that drive to floppies, but it never ran
out of retries and got all of the drive contents. Do you have a way to
boot DOS from a floppy? I had to have DOS on the floppy along with the
program (only one floppy drive on my 200 MHz recovery computer) so it
could boot from that floppy and find DOS at the end of each execution
(to read one file).

I don't think the DOS program was large, but I can't access it right
this instant.

73, Jerry, K0CQ