Well, I've got a Kryoflux now, connected to the cheapest standard PC
floppy drive that I could find on eBay, and it's working really well.
The supplied software has a GUI (if you're willing to install Java,
anyway; pleasingly it is OS X v10.8 compatible) and one of the output
options is a raw MFM sector image, which ends up being a .MGT in Sam
emulator terms. So the process is just insert disk, click 'start',
adjust a file extension and repeat. It takes a bit more than one and a
half minutes to do a good disk, obviously more if it ends up retrying
sectors.
My disks have been in my mother's (standalone, sheltered but
uninsulated) garage for the last six years but were in a house for the
10–15 years before that and I'm probably getting an 80% read success
rate. Total cost for interface and drive was about £100 but I've
recovered lots of work by myself as a child so it was easily worth it;
this is the first time I've had any means of imaging disks at all so
I've not had an opportunity to rescue anything before.
Definitely recommended for anybody else in a similar situation.
On 24 July 2012 23:20, Thomas Harte wrote:
> I've ordered one so I'll report on my findings when I have some.
>
> Sadly I'll just be preserving some of my own early creative work — I
> was about 11 at the time so it's nothing that would be of interest to
> anybody else. I'm not going to have anything of interest that's legal
> to distribute that isn't already freely available.
>
> On 24 July 2012 09:57, Leszek Chmielewski wrote:
>> No, but, read here:
>> http://www.softpres.org/news:2010-02-18
>> Looks like it supports SAM Coupé.
>> I only do not know if it saves in MGT format.
>>
>> Am 23.07.2012 18:04, schrieb Thomas Harte:
>>
>> Being back in the UK for maybe three weeks and having uncovered some old
>> floppies, and having no access to a PC with a floppy drive controller, did
>> anyone try the Kyroflux route?
>>
>> On Thursday, 28 July 2011, Leszek Chmielewski wrote:
>>>
>>>
> You're welcome, glad to hear you got your data back. Most of my Sam
> disks
> are unreadable; whether my original Sam was close to the edge of spec
> or
> whether the disks have just degraded over time I'm unsure.
>
> And congrats on the new arrival! Sell the Sam and invest in some
> heavy-duty
> earplugs :)
>
> Geoff
>
>>>
>>> It depends much on the disc drive. I had here some SAM discs which were
>>> unreadable on PC or SAM, but a very good Drive I have for my +D was still
>>> able to copy it to new formated disc, and I was able to copy almost all
>>> files on my PC. The fail rate is very low. If the files are valuable for
>>> you, I can try to recover them.
>>>
>>> Leszek
>>
>>
