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.

Agreed on finding a drive

I'm sure that will be the problem. Unless you search on Ebay or Craigslist for someone with one in their basement....good luck. I have a 5 1/4 floppy drive and some disks set aside for the exact same reason.....someday I'll want that info and then I'll be all set.

Re:Agreed on finding a drive

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 [fvempel.nl] 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/ [cpczone.net] were really helpful.

Good luck, you will need it!

Re:Agreed on finding a drive

You can plug PC 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive on an Amstrad, they use the same interface!!
http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/3%C2%BD%22_%26_5%C2%BC%22_Disk_Drives [cpcwiki.com]

Simplest way...

Try emailing the people who write those emulators you mention.

Company that advertises this service

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 [demon.co.uk] company that offers conversions @ £5 a disk.

This isn't the only company, but a google will find the others.

Re:Agreed on finding a drive

Especially since you can find the whole Amstrad 6128 for 20 Euros [ebay.com].

Re:Agreed on finding a drive

Exactly, the $285 is much cheaper. ;)

Re:Agreed on finding a drive

Ultra-ATA? Ha ha... you are so young. IDE didn't even exist yet when the 5 1/4" floppy first appeared. Those were the days of 5 MB hard disk with ST-506 interfaces, 1-5 MHz CPUs, and 40-column monochrome displays. Now get off my lawn!

Re:Agreed on finding a drive

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 [wikipedia.org]. 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...

Re:Find an old system

You're a programmer,

Uh, didn't he say they were written in BASIC?

(=I kid. Really. Uh huh.=)

NOT true. My diskettes are completely readable.

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:

"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: /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.

Find somebody with a working Amstrad.

Otherwise you're pretty boned.

Reading 26 year old disks

I was recently able to successfully read data from my old Apple II+ elephant memory disks from 1981-1982. It worked nearly perfectly, with only a few tracks out of ten disks being unreadable. Of course the old disks only stored about 140K per disk, so the tracks must have been huge by modern standards.

I used disk2fdi for this. You can get this at: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi

I see a market here

In addition to the usual hapless corporate customers needing to restore 10 year old backup tapes at the request of lawyers, forensic data recoverers can now market to nostalgic boomers looking to relive their C64 and Sinclair ZX-80 experiences.

There is big money here - look at the motorcycle industry, which used to be pitched to outlaws, kids, and the outdoorsy, and is now aiming for the Viagra and $100-bottle-of-wine crowd.

I still have a huge library of Fortran code on 1/2" tape. If I ever want to see that code again will somebody please kill me.

Hardware is easy to find

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/ [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.

Not that hard to find a lot of info

You can start here...

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/amstrad/ [obsoleteco...museum.org]

Google is your friend...

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 [computer-convert.com]
http://www.vintagetech.com/?section=conversion [vintagetech.com] (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 [live.com]

However, you may find looking on ebay is cheaper and more fun.

Re:Google is your friend...

Vintage Tech is run by a friend of mine; he has a HUGE warehouse full of various old computer systems here in Livermore, CA. I'd suggest sending an email; he'll probably get back to you within a few hours and could let you know if he can do it. I'd be amazed if he doesn't have an Amstrad system somewhere.

Iron filings and a scanner

Sprinkle the disks with iron filings and scan them on a flatbed scanner. Then write a new and absolutely pointless program to retrieve the data from the scans.

A Quick Google Search Turned Up This

http://www.pcwking1.netfirms.com/disc-conversions.html [netfirms.com]

I assume we are talking about the 3" disks

In which case, I did this just last weekend. It's not easy though. Requirements were:

• 1 Amstrad PC (with floppy drive)
• 1 PC running Window 98 with parallel port
• 1 copy of Locolink, which includes a parallel cable and transfer software

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 [locoscript.com] 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 [diskdoctor.co.uk] of them. In the US, try here [ukonline.co.uk].

Good luck!

The advantages of punched paper tape

My first programming was on punched paper tape, which I can still read. I am not saying I have a machine that could read it, but at least I can look at the punches and figure out what the characters were.

When I was in grad school, there was some data stored on punched paper tape, stored fan-folded. The tape had dried out and cracked where the folds were. (The cracks would be in the middle of a byte, especially a high one, as they would have more holes punched in them.) They wanted to save the data, so they hired a under-grad to spend all summer sending the tape through a reader, one 4 foot section at a time, figure out what the byte was where the crack was, type that in, and then proceed to the next 4 foot section. I still think that that must have been the worst IT job ever.

Re:VMware

Yes, because VMWare will totally help you run a system that originally ran on a Z80, and used utterly non-standard disks which no other drive will accept.

Re:VMware

Well VMware is pretty damn awesome.

Re:you missed the point.

working with my 3' floppy

Three FOOT floppy? Hate to to see it when it's not floppy.