Mucked-up floppy disks

[Roger Murray]

I have two dead floppy disks here.  On day X (I don't remember how long ago
this whole mess started), I took two fresh disks out, formatted them
(/dev/fd096ds9, if you're interested), mkfs'ed them, mounted them (one at a
time, of course) and filled them up with some 1- and 2-year-old data that I
wanted to keep, but didn't need on the hard disk anymore.

On day X+1, I decided to put some more data on them so I took them out of the
really neat box where I kept them safe and sound and mounted them.  Well,
attempted to mount them anyway.  Disk 1 had a bad block 2 and disk 2 had a bad
super block and/or block 1.  I have no idea what happened to these poor
innocent floppies to make them turn on me so.

I've tried fsck and dd.  I tried copying them over to good disks from DOS
with both DISKCOPY and COPYIIPC.  DISKCOPY couldn't read sectors and COPYIIPC
complained while writing out the new disk.

If this were my Apple, I would have pulled out Bag of Tricks, reformatted
track 0 and went back on my merry way, losing nothing in the process.  It's
bad enough I'm in a PC world, but under XENIX of all things.  How do I explain
to my PC disk editor that prompts me for a filename "Umm...well, you see this
is a XENIX floppy.  It has a a super block and i-nodes and..."?

Is there anything I can do or should I stop holding back the tears?

Before you start talking about backups, I did have one.  However, I backed
up over it once I placed the data on the disks which, until now, have never
failed me.  I also know it's not the drive because my other disks still
work (I checked).

The system: SCO XENIX 2.0.4 running on a Sperry IT

Thanks a lot.
-- 
Roger Murray

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