Old floppy disks and data recovery

[Eddy Deegan]

I've seen the subject of recovering data from floppy disks pop up a few times and I've raised it myself so hopefully this info will be useful to someone.

I've got 2 large boxes of floppy disks from the Atari ST and the Acorn Archimedes both of which I've been carefully preserving for decades in the knowledge that there is treasure therein yet unable to read them.

On the Atari ST especially, as it was possible to format a floppy with extra tracks and sectors to exceed the standard capacity, which is a feature I used a lot. Unfortunately this was rather dependent on the manufacturing tolerance of one's specific (SD or DD) floppy disk unit so there was no guarantee that another drive could read a disk formatted in this way.

At least, until recently-ish. I was a little late to discover it but there is a fantastic gizmo called a Greaseweazle which is a tiny PCB (bearing a chip or two) with a USB device port on one side and a floppy disk connector on the other. A standard 1.44Mb floppy has no problem with the quirky Atari formats.

It can read absolutely any format; it doesn't care. It'll rip a floppy using the raw flux (whatever that means) regardless of the number of sectors, what file system was used, or what device wrote it originally and save the image in a number of formats to your hard drive.

It has native support for Atari, Amiga, Archimedes, Akai, Ensonique, Sega, Commodore and PC disks but if you have floppies from an obscure bit of kit then it'll happily create a large (40Mb+) raw image of the magnetic properties of the floppy for later analysis. If nothing else it's good to know that whatever you can rip from a floppy can be preserved from further degradation.

More info here and here. I'm sure there are alternatives and other sites but I've just recovered some precious data that's been stashed on floppies in my boxes for decades and I'm, well, not unhappy about it

[sonics]

Thanks, that's very useful information. Someone will no doubt approach me soon with a job that needs something like that!

(I just junked all my old floppies; no-one needs my old noodlings, least of all me!)

[DGL.]

My solution was to get an old laptop with a real FDD/controller, combine that with the free omniflop software and their special driver and it'll read almost anything. I know it'll happily read/write 1.6mb GEM disks.

[Wonks]

Or maybe 1.6Mb disks (correct units Ed).

[RichardT]

I paid a professional to recover data from some PC floppies I could no longer read with my drive - he managed to recover about 70% of the material, including one track that I've just released.

There can be valuable stuff hidden in those old noodlings!

[Tomás Mulcahy]

That's very cool Eddie.

I get a lot of mileage from old noodlings. The older me is far less judgemental

I've got everything I've ever made since I started in 1989 in some accessible format in the cloud.

Many of the patches I did for Arturia CZV were from backups of floppies of an obscure Mac SysEx librarian. So that was worth the care!

The only thing left is the Casio CZ-5000 data cassettes of sequences. Someday someone will go to the trouble of making a utility to convert those to .MID with correct program change SysEx applied.

I'm only half joking. So many things have been modelled/ recreated/ plugin'd it's just amazing to me.

[muzines]

I went through this process a while back, going through stacks of old CDs, floppies, in order to rescue/recover anything important before disposing of all the plastic, and did indeed manage to preserve a lot of things.

My biggest find was one unlabelled CD, which in an obscure folder contained a backup of my old Atari ST hard drive at the time, with which I was basically able to restore (virtually) my old Atari setup and most of my old files from that time.

I still have the drive, and there was a period in time or a year or two after that backup was made where there are Logic projects I'd still love to have - that's more or less the only stuff from my history I don't have - but the drive is completely dead and unresponsive and it resisted all my efforts to coax it to life.

In fact, this weekend, I dug out and remixed an old track for fun, just to compare what I'd make of it now with my modern toolset, compared to what I did back in the day, when all the stuff we have now was basically science-fiction...

So many things have been modelled/ recreated/ plugin'd it's just amazing to me.

Indeed, same!

[tea for two]

I get a lot of mileage from old noodlings.

So many things have been modelled/ recreated/ plugin'd it's just amazing to me.

I've kept floppies of noodlings from workstations I purchased mid late 90s.
Those Jedi that made free and low cost plugins synths sample libraries nowadays which is like it's a kind of magic lol has made music making so much easier for me made my music pieces not sound as utter tosh.

[sonics]

So it looks like I'm in the minority here. To explain, I simply produce new noodlings. They are always better than the old because of my greater knowledge and experience. YNMV*.

*Your Noodlings May Vary.

[muzines]

So it looks like I'm in the minority here. To explain, I simply produce new noodlings. They are always better than the old because of my greater knowledge and experience. YNMV*.

Sure, I do that too. However, there can be interesting ideas in old stuff, which now, with your greater knowledge and experience, you can develop further than you could at the time, or take to some place new.

[BigRedX]

I'm with sonics here. The way that I see it, is if my old ideas were any good I'd still be able to remember them. When revisiting old material I prefer to re-create it from scratch either using my memory or, if it exists, a live or demo recording. That way I'm forced to reconsider each element of the old arrangement and ensure it is still the best I can come up with. If I still had access to the multi-track tapes and/or MIDI sequences I'd be tempted to keep a lot of stuff that I can now improve upon.

[ManFromGlass]

The noodlings may be fantastic (or so memory says) but my biggest issue was not labelling tracks with the name of the synth/sampler/patch etc.

So I have general memories of greatness but no way to remember the sound palette that I thought made them great. The price I pay for not slowing down to organize and label.

[tea for two]

In my yooof my playing was a whole lotta tighter in my timing. It's like a window into somebody else as if it was someone else playing.
Captured on floppy.
Nowadays I'm forever having to fix timing issues as I'm so sloppy.

[Tomás Mulcahy]

I'm with sonics here. The way that I see it, is if my old ideas were any good I'd still be able to remember them.

Think of it as a big notebook, except it's digital so you get to record more detail in the rhythm and assign a specific sound. All composers had notebooks. Yes, even Mozart had to write stuff down despite the myths!

I'm not really talking about recordings of performances. I'm talking about melodies, riffs, chord progressions that I did not have the tools to develop compositionally back then.

I much prefer forgetting them. It clears my mind of whatever was blocking the development. Usually an over attachment to some aspect such as a cliché, or playing technique, or unecessary complexity.

Very often, to "finish" the old idea, I either slow it down, or delete material, or make it less or more repetitive, or all of those depending.

Even just loading up the MIDI and using completely different sounds, because you don't have the originals, is a good development technique in itself.

[ManFromGlass]

I have found this too. Sometimes I think the brain is finally ready to finish that ancient tune/melody/snippet etc, and sometimes it does.
I don’t miss loading sounds from multiple floppies into a few 32Mb samplers.

[tacitus]

I often leave stuff unfinished but it’s still there, in my Sibelius folder. When I dig out one of these musical truffles I can usually make a pretty quick judgment of what to do with it. I can usually remember what I was after, and possibly find a way to finish or repurpose the snippet/chunk or whatever. Sometimes it changes, in the twinkling of an eye, to something I can use. Occasionally I splice pieces together to make the equivalent of a banana and smoked haddock loaf. You’d be just as nauseated by the sound of it as by the actual food I’ve imagined it as …

[FrankF]

Ooo arr oo arr, be not so hasty, Malvolio, for there are more things dreamt of...heaven...earth...philosophy, er, etc.

https://thecornishfishmonger.co.uk/blo ... ck-pudding

[tacitus]

Oo er, I was a bit hasty, wasn’t I? Merely wanted to give a flavour of how strange my music can be. Oh well, back to the quest for savoury meringues …