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Retrieving Data From Old Amstrad Floppies?
Jeppe Utzon writes "Back in 1987, when I was a teenager in high school still, I spent most evenings, nights and weekends writing small programs in BASIC on my Amstrad CPC 6128. Some of these programs were simple games, some drew graphics, some could help me with math or train me in French — and most were utterly pointless. But I never had as much satisfying fun as when writing those programs — even if no one in my family understood any of it when I proudly displayed the fruits of three sleepless nights of labor. Now, 20 years later, I still have a sealed pack of about 15 disks with all my work on them (along with a few of my favorite games) and I was wondering if it was possible to get the data out somehow so that I could run it in emulation on my Mac. I know of the emulators, but have no clue what would be needed to extract the data — or if it is even extractable after all these years. I realize the chances of the data still being intact are quite low, but I'd like to give it a shot. So if anyone has any pointers it would be greatly appreciated."
A large hurdle will be finding a drive to read the Amstrad disks at all.
I used disk2fdi for this. You can get this at: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi
It should be trivially easy to do, given a short BASIC program and five minutes on ebay.
Just search ebay for an Amstrad CPC6128 or a Sinclair Spectrum +3 or an Amstrad PCW. There are still plenty of them around. (I have a Spectrum +3 with a working 3 inch Amstrad floppy drive as it happens, the floppy drive is quite handy for restoring the firmware on the Spectrum ethernet card I'm developing if I blow some non-functional code onto the flash ROM and can't reprogram it any more over ethernet). It would be best to get a CPC6128 - if you get a Spectrum +3 or a PCW you may have to write some low-level software to read CPC formatted discs.
The CPC, if I remember right, has an RS232 port. Write a short BASIC program to send your data to a PC via RS232.
Incidentally, the most common fault on the 3 inch Amstrad drives is a broken belt - you can buy new ones from rwap software: http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/ - while this firm caters for the Spectrum, since the later models were built by Amstrad with the 3in drive, they carry parts for 3in drives.
The other good news is most floppies seem to hold up well - while the 3in discs don't seem to do as well as 5.25 in discs (I have only one faulty disc in many 20+ year old ones for my BBC micro, but rather more faulty 3in discs - all pre-recorded game discs) - so I suspect your discs will all read fine.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You can start here...
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/amstrad/
There are a number of companies that do media conversion. They can read old floppies, 9-track tapes, tape cartridges and other obsolete media.
Try:
http://computer-convert.com/index.htm
http://www.vintagetech.com/?section=conversion (they also do 7-track tape, paper tape and punch cards!)
Google: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=media+conversion+floppy+tape+&src=IE-SearchBox
However, you may find looking on ebay is cheaper and more fun.
Floppy-wise, they used a non-standard 3" drive, which may have been made by Shugart. That's going to be the real hurdle.
My own Amstrad lasted me through to my college years, when I used to use it to solve physics problems. My favorite was getting it to calculate anomalous Zeeman effect splitting profiles.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Yep, once you find one you are going to need to transfer it onto a PC. I never could find a drive, so I gave up, but here are some links that will help with the task.
This link http://www.fvempel.nl/3pc.html has some good details on how to splice it onto a PC floppy cable. There are also loads of good links on his page for extracting the data.
The guys on http://www.cpczone.net/ were really helpful.
Good luck, you will need it!
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
If you get desperate, there are data recovery services you can hire (at pretty ridiculous expense I'm sure) that can retrieve data from busted hard drives and floppies. Given that they have to do things like mount naked platters and floppies and read them as-is, it seems likely that their gear can accomodate a range of different sizes and sector layouts and whatnot.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
http://www.pcwking1.netfirms.com/disc-conversions.html
It is possible to connect an Amstrad 3" floppy drive to a PC computer. Both CPCs and PC computers use the same type of floppy disk controller. You can get a suitable drive by purchasing an old Amstrad PCW word processor device. Here is one application for reading the disk format on a Windows system:
http://www.cpcmania.com/cpcdiskxp/cpcdiskxp.htm
Several other similar tools exist.
Here are instructions on connecting a 3" drive to a PC:
http://www.amstradcg.nl/econvers.html#3PC
I think he was referring to physical dimensions, not capacity.
Wow! Just how much is it worth to you?
$285.14?
Seems a bit pricey to me but your nostalgic millage may vary.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
In my case we had an Amstrad PCW8256 in full working order, so that covered reading the disks. The Locolink software is hard to come by but I picked up a copy on E-Bay. It's designed for transferring and converting Locoscript files but will transfer other files as well just fine. It only works with Window 98 on the PC side though.
If you don't have an actual working Amstrad then your best bet is probably finding a hacked-up 3" drive that you can connect to a PC. You might be more likely to be able to purchase the whole computer.
If you're in the UK there are services that will transfer the files for you for 10GBP a disk. Here's a list of them. In the US, try here.
Good luck!
The really old ones (including the Commodore 64) connected via a serial interface.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Just the drive (got an old AT style PC) here: Ebay!
It depends on the platform.
IBM-compatibles used a special floppy interface - the controller is on the motherboard.
And, if a modern PC has the hardware to drive a 3.5" floppy, it can drive a 5.25" floppy. So, yes.
But, the IBM-compatible floppy controller might not be able to handle these Amstrad disks.
If a floppy is properly stored and kept indoors, it should still be readable after all that time. I have some TRS-80 floppies from the early '80s which read just fine a couple of years ago with a Catweasel board. There were some read errors, but those were probably there back in the day. So 25 years is certainly not unreasonable.
But it's still not too hard to find 5 1/4" floppy drives in relatively good condition. Good luck finding an Amstrad drive. Is there even an Amstrad users group in the US?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Amstrad did make some IBM PC compatibles, but that'd be too easy - IIRC, they used standard (well, as standard as you can call it back then) 360 kiB 5.25" floppies, too.
And, all VMware does is virtualization (not emulation) of an x86 PC.
This guy needs to find a working Amstrad that can read his disks, and then use it to create disk images. I don't know if there's a utility to automatically do that for the Amstrads, though. (For Apple IIs, it's stupid easy to make disk images, thanks to ADTPro and cheap serial cables.)
Especially since you can find the whole Amstrad 6128 for 20 Euros.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
keep looking on ebay for an old cpc 6128 or PCW-8256 or PCw-8512 (they all had the same 3" Hitachi microdrive). You can probably pick one up for like 10 uk pounds or something,
The Hitachi 3" Microdrive which was intended to be a direct competitor to Sony's 3.5" format. (Unfortunately for Amstrad the Sony format was the one that won-out in the PC world). Because of that I'm guessing the possibility that the 3" Microdrive has a PC-compatable connector may be high (but I don't know for sure).
Of course even if you got the drive connected to your PC OK still the problem would still be to get your PC to recognise the AMSDOS file system on the floppy.
I guess another option (if you get your hands on an amstrad computer) would be to write some little program that implements a simple file transfer protocol via whatever ports (RS-232 etc) that are available on the amstrad you get, then connect it directly to a regular PC via a homebrew cable.
But, the IBM-compatible floppy controller might not be able to handle these Amstrad disks.
If that's a problem, get one of these controllers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CatWeasel. Unless they have a driver already, you'll need to know how to write a program to decode data, bit by bit, but these controllers will read and write nearly anything. I have a MK3, and I was able to get it to read the data on old Ohio Scientific disks.
Now if I could just find a working 8" disk drive...
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
I looked into this a while ago, I have a few CF2 3" disks, and would love to read what I wrote when I was 14.
I found this company that offers conversions @ £5 a disk.
This isn't the only company, but a google will find the others.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
You may find old Amstrad drives or sources for the drives at Halted Specialities in Santa Clara.
http://www.halted.com/
Using Google, I fouund the solution. It appears that this guy can do the conversion for you and return your data in hours. Cost would not be prohibitive and would support the Amstrad addiction.
He seems to have a pretty good handle on all the conversion problems, too. His page is a fun read just for that.
http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/9503/9503article5.htm
:)
PC Alien. it was a IBM PC DOS based program that would allow you to read older computer disk systems (5 1/4 etc). i remember using it on my 80x86 to read CP/M based disks from my microbee
You most likely do not have a bunch of 3" floppy disks. At least working ones.
Magnetic media and especially floppies have a limited lifetime. They are not as bad as tapes where you need to rewrite the whole tape once every 6 months or your lose your data. None the less, they are least likely to have survived for 15+ years. The plastic carrier has become brittle, the magnetic media has flaked off and the bits on the media itself have "floated". When you combine all this with no ECC or any other error recovery info your chance of reading something is pretty close to 0.
That's why I have copied all of the more valuable info of my old floppies and hard drives long ago into a set of images and keep them in an area which gets backed up regularly. Their are puny in size compared to modern data and this way if I ever need something from them I can always get it.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I just went and got a diskette hand-labeled "Windows for Workgroups 3.11, #1". Windows 95 replaced WFW, so the diskette is 14 years old. It is completely readable. Need evidence? Quote from SETUP.TXT:
/v /r /f. It found 512 bytes in a bad sector in one file, and said it fixed the problem. All other files were perfect.
"AT&T(R) Safari Computer
------
If you have an AT&T Safari computer, you cannot maintain two versions of Windows on your system. You must upgrade over your previous version of Windows, if you have one. If you set up Windows for Workgroups version 3.11 in its own directory, it will not use the special drivers required to run on the computer."
You said, "The plastic carrier has become brittle..." That kind of plastic is a hazard to the environment, because it doesn't break down.
"... the magnetic media has flaked off..." The substrate is Mylar. The glue is intensely adherent.
' "the bits on the media itself have "floated" ' Not so, I think I can install Windows for Workgroups again any time I like.
I ran chkdsk a:
ddrescue is an open source disk recovery tool based on dd. It can make a disk image from any kind of disk, regardless of format and it is designed to be very robust reading through bad blocks as you're likely to have on disks that old. You just need to have a floppy drive to connect to. ddrescue will compile and run on Linux, OS X and maybe Cygwin.
Once you have a disk image, Foremost can extract files from it. It is also open source and can be compiled and run on many different platforms and doesn't care about the filesystem on the disk image (or original disk). It searches for files based on header information. If need be, you can edit what header information it looks for. Since your BASIC source code is, presumably, ASCII text files, it shouldn't be a problem.
Travan - definitely.
DAT - highly recommended
DLT - while it is suitable for long term storage I will run an archive refresh on it every 6 months or so.
Note - if you definitely _want_ to keep your data you have to refresh it within the period when it is readable with a very high probability of success. So while you can read a DLT from the shelf that is 3+ years old if your job is to keep the data on that DLT alive forever, you have to reread it and rewrite it back every 6 months or so.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Wow - a CPC question on /. The best years of my life were spent hacking on a CPC - I worked as freelance technical editor for Amstrad Action magazine (on which the mighty Future Publishing was founded), coded a DTP system, a load of demos, a route-planner (you know, "I want to get from London to Edinburgh, what's the quickest way?"), and so on.
I used to get a handful of letters to AA's technical Qs+As column ("Techy Forum") every month asking "how do I transfer my files to a PC?". Lots of posters have mentioned the easiest ways to do it, which would probably be the ways I'd have recommended at the time: data transfer bureaux, hooking up a drive to a PC and copying across, etc. etc.
Here's a more involved solution, which is the best long-term one for the serious CPC hacker, and is how I do it. I'm not seriously recommending you do this.
Get a CPC with second drive interface (i.e. anything except an unexpanded 464), and connect a 3.5in drive - any standard Shugart 3.5in drive - to it. Theoretically you need a separate power supply for the 3.5in drive, but you can actually hotwire this to the monitor power supply.
Then use WriteDSK on the CPC to transfer CPC discs into .DSK images on a DOS-formatted 720k disc. (The CPC's FDC can't cope with 1.44Mb discs.) Getting WriteDSK onto your CPC in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader. :)
Put that in a USB floppy drive, copy across to your Mac and run in WinAPE under Parallels - far and away the best CPC emulator there is.
For general CPC information, have a look at CPCwiki. It's a goldmine in itself, but best of all is the scan archive of Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User etc. etc.
How about reading your Amstrad floppies on your Amstrad CPC6128 and copying them to the attached PC floppy...? ;-)
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."