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Apple II Disk Restoration Project

E

EagleTG

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 19, 2015
Messages
231
Location
Near Allentown, PA
Hi all.

I've taken on a project to restore a handful of Apple II disks. Around 50 or so of them.

The owner of the disks and I are interested only in the data on the disks, to that end I'm currently using ADTPro to restore on a known-good drive.

The original disks have some mold issues that I've been contending with. I've made good progress on this front with lots of drive head cleanings, and some work in cleaning the disk "cookie" itself including transplanting the "cookie" to a donor disk sleeve. This part I've got pretty well figured-out. I'm probably in the neighborhood of 32 of the disks where I've been able to get some form of a "good read" off of them (where data shows up in the images either via mounting in an emulator or viewing with a hex editor).

What I'm struggling with is the format of the disks themselves. A lot of them are simply unknown. Original labels (if they exist) on the disks just say things like "88-89", and we have no idea what was on the disk. I've found that some of the disks show a catalog of contents from ProDOS. Some boot in an emulator when attempted, some don't. I've also noticed that some of them won't image properly even if the original disks I'm working with are copies themselves. I had suspected copy protection, but I guess I'm not 100% sure.

For each disk, I've made two images, one using the regular copy mode of ADTPro, one with the nibbler mode. This gives a bit greater success, usually if a disk doesn't work in one format, it will work in the other format. Is this the recommended approach?

Most of it appears to be word processing data. The disks seem to be widely written via a program called PFSWrite, I've had some issues with testing my recovered images but I'm wondering if I'm just not using PFSWrite correctly. Some also appear to be written via AppleWorks.

My thoughts are a bit scattered on this project, but I guess my main question is, what is the "best" way to archive these to get the greatest chance of the images being usable? I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to Apple disk formats, and I'm beginning to understand that it was really the "wild west" with Apple disk formats back then, there were really no standards. What is the best approach to image these disks, with some chance that they might work the first time (as I'm especially concerned that some of these will be damaged to the point where I might only have one or two chances to read them).

I've considered using 4am's Passport, as I think that seems to detect certain aspects of the disk image better. My issue there is that software is geared more toward copy protected disks of which most of these are not.

Also, I'd appreciate pointers on how to convert this data to a newer format. I've seen some success with using CiderPress, and have been able to get some of the disks working via emulation (as mentioned above). Any other tips on converting to newer standards? For most of this, I'd probably be happy with some sort of text format.

Additionally, what is the preferred Apple II forum out there? I see some communication on the Apple sections of AtariAge and here, but due to the amount of activity in the Apple community, I'd expect to see more posts out there. Especially judging from the frequency of posts on some of the Apple Facebook groups. My Google-fu is failing me on this front.

Thanks again for any pointers that you can provide!

Edit: I forgot to mention, I understand that the PFS:Write program was written in Pascal, and that the resulting disks were in the Apple Pascal disk format. I have read that this complicates things as many copy programs can't understand this format. I have a strong suspicion that this is a lot of what I'm running into and am unsure how to get past.
 
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The early version of PFS Write does appear to use Pascal format and the later version was ProDOS. There is a program PFS Convert to copy files to ProDOS and is on the Asimov ftp.
The best help on these questions would probably still be the newsgroup comp.sys.apple2 which is still very active. If these are data disks, I doubt they are copy protected but just
proprietary to the PFS Write program. As far as AppleWorks, the data disks should be straight ProDOS. Most data disks will not be bootable at all and might just do an ugly crash.
Depending on what program formatted them, they might give a message about being a data disk. Getting them into a dsk and nib image with ADTPro would be the best approach
and using Copy II+ to get a fresh physical disk copy if you have 2 drives. With C2+, going into the bitcopier then choosing manual sector copy might copy those across. I personally
never worked with PFS Write data disks so not sure if that works. Extracting those to text files will be a challenge. If you have some images to share, I would be more than happy to
experiment on them. I've been an Apple II user on and off since 1983. Hope this helps.

Larry G
 
As I was riding the bus to work, I remembered AppleWin emulator has a printer to text file so running PFS Write should be able to print files to text !!!

Larry G
 
These are great tips, thanks! I'm still not able to get PFS:Write to read the disks correctly in the emulator. I've verified that the disks have data based on the hex contents of the image file. I can actually read some text there, I just think I'm clueless on how to use PFS:Write. :)

Thanks!
 
I've figured out what was wrong with PFS:Write in the emulator. Retrogear's tip about some being Pascal and some being ProDOS clued me in, I don't think I fully realized that there were INCOMPATIBLE versions of the PFS:Write disk formats floating around out there. While watching the emulator boot PFS:Write, I saw the "ProDOS" splash screen and then it clicked... Hey, this is the ProDOS version of PFS:Write (Duh). I wonder if the data disks I have are Pascal format?

To figure this part out, I didn't seem to have any quick luck finding a Pascal version of PFS:Write so I decide to start concentrating on getting the converter to work (PFSConvert.SHK). For future Googlers, this file is available in the Asimov FTP copy of PFSWrite.zip. Converting it to a DSK using CiderPress and then booting ProDOS and launching PFSConvert was the process to get this running.

Upon running PFSConvert against one of the archived/imaged copies of the data disks shows me a file listing!! Additionally, converting to a freshly created ProDOS image mounted in the second drive proceeded normally and works perfectly from the (ProDOS) copy of PFS:Write that I've got!

This is a bit of a convoluted process, but does give me the ability to confirm that my archiving methods are solid and that the resulting data is readable given the proper hoops have been jumped through.

Does anyone know where I can find an older (Pascal) copy of PFS:Write off of the tops of their heads? I've done some fast Googling, but haven't found anything yet. I have some physical floppies that profess to be PFS:Write, and since those are in the same collection I'd imagine they were the ones used to write the data disks but again haven't had any luck with those.

Thanks again for the help. :)
 
A very large percentage of software was sold on non-standard format protected disks back in the early 80's (Even programs like Visicalc were protected). You may need a program like Locksmith to copy some of the protected disks. No way I know to "image" them for running in an emulator.
 
ADTPro can create nibble images of protected disks that run in AppleWin. Sometimes protected images will work ok

Larry G
 
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