WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 33395126

(no title)

benjaminpv | 3 years ago

I'm not terribly familiar with Apple ][s either but given the surrounding context it sounds like there was a computer and fixed disk that was sent to a junk sorting center. It was initially thought that the disk they were sent was bad (with the owner having written as much on it), but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad.

With the author's knowledge and some nearby spare parts he was able to revive the disk and computer and then started looking through its contents by dumping it to the screen (sorta like if you look at a raw hex dump from dd or a tool like Spinrite). From that he realized that the source code for that copying software was on the disk, the source code everyone theorized had been lost.

discuss

order

Someone|3 years ago

> but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad

The disk head got stuck because the head was ‘glued’ to the platter by stiction (https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1051141, https://hardrecoveryman.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/release-of-... a fairly common issue in the day for certain brands of hard disk, and he did a quick and dirty ‘repair’, first by trying to get it unstuck through inertia, then by opening the enclosure and forcing the head to get unstuck.

He likely did not use a clean room, so that repair probably was temporary.

> and then started looking through its contents by dumping it to the screen (sorta like if you look at a raw hex dump from dd or a tool like Spinrite)

They ‘just’ booted the disk and used the ProDOS CATALOG command (or its shorthand CAT) to list the files on the disk.

aasasd|3 years ago

I nearly fainted reading about how the dude whacked the disk to make the head unstick and then jiggled the head over the platter. One thing I learned in my tech initiation years is that head on the platter = death and woe.

Also, judging from how pallets with containers of old stuff were dropped right beside the guys, and how they were going through the hardware by throwing it up in the air, it sounds like the environment was the opposite of clean.