Corrupt disks for Serpent Isle, please help!

[RaptorZX3]

hi! i recently bought a bunch of old games, including Ultima Underworld 1, Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle, U7 and UO1 are on 5.25" floppies (i'm getting a drive for that soon).

I was testing thru my 3.5" floppies of Serpent Isle, and i discovered that disk 4 and 7 have errors on them, i tried to save the content, strangely after "fixing" the clusters in Scandisk, the unzipping process gave me an error, saying i probably have a bad disk.

But then i thought Scandisk was able to move the "almost unreadable data" to another space on the floppies.

To make it quick, so far i would need your help. Does anyone here could help me getting an Image file (.bif in MagicISO) of the Disk 4 and 7 of the 3.5" version of Serpent Isle please? all other disks seem to be fine, but those two.

I did created backups of all other healthy floppies, so in case one go bad, i could just grab a healthy floppy and write the ISO on it.

Please contact me on my email: theraptor01@gmail.com

i would be very grateful if you could help me getting healthy Image/ISO of those floppy again.

There's nothing more nostalgic than installing a game the good old way with floppies, so i would like to enjoy doing that while i still can.

thank you very much in advance!

[Dominus]

I'll take a look. I made images when I wrote the installation part of the docs and I think I still have them around. Or at least the content (since there is no hardware copy protection, just the content might be fine, too).

[RaptorZX3]

this is what i'm doing though, doing backups of my original disks, and hopefully not hitting floppies with problems.

I still need to check many of them on 5.25" floppies, including:

-Ultima Underworld 1
-Ultima 7
-Bard's Tale 3
-Eye of the Beholder 2
-Pool of Radiance
-Curse of the Azure Bonds
-Secret of the Silver Blades

Though if i do hit more corrupted disks for games other than Ultima series, i can't ask for them here.

Like i said, i use MagicISO to create floppy ISOs (in "bif" format), but i scan them with Scandisk (or Chkdsk in Windows 2000 and up)

[Dominus]

Sorry can't find it right away. I have an idea on which CD I put it, though

[RaptorZX3]

Please send me an email when you find them. I was able to get a craploads of 3.5" floppy disks yesterday, so if i ever have to replace those disks, i'll still have the ISOs of them.

It really suck that those floppy disks tend to go bad so much faster than CDs or anything else...

I know i could get those games on some websites, but it's not the same as when you install them from the actual floppies. It seem to be much more rewarding to play a game after installing it from floppies, lol!

[monotremata]

Dang. I still have Bards Tale 3, Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Secret of the Silver Blades but no way to read the floppies.
Only 5.25" drives I still have are my C64s.. If any of those are corrupted and provided everythings legit, I can probably find disk images for you..

[RaptorZX3]

yes this is completely legit, i bought those games from someone in my province. If you want me to take photos to prove it, i can, and i can also put my face in the photo as well, lol!

I also have Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, while i was able to install the game (single 3.5" floppy) without giving any error message, Scandisk detected errors, which make me wonder if they are real errors, so i didn't "corrected" them.

Since the install process of Ishar is a .bat file which practically copy everything from the floppy to the hard disk, what i did is just copy everything installed to another floppy.

I need to keep track of those backups on my 1gb SD card, and NOT losing it.

[MeddlingMonk]

Sorry. To prove you are legit you must provide a skin sample, blood sample, urine sample, stool sample, ottoman sample, and appear in a major Broadway production.

[RaptorZX3]

I do have the original games and floppies here, but before showing a photo as a proof...i would like to know if someone can help me first...floppy ISOs, or if this just work fine, a copy of the floppies' content inside ZIP files.

[Colourless]

Being pedantic you don't make ISOs of floppies you make disk images. ISO is used for CDs because ISO9660 its the filesystem used by CDs. The extension .iso says this file contains an ISO9660 filesystem. Floppies don't have a FAT filesystem so its wrong to call the disk images ISOs. Typically you'd use the .img at the extension.

[RaptorZX3]

A friend of mine told me you can just copy the content of the floppy on your hard disk, and then on another floppy. i remember trying to save files (after "repairing") from a floppy, and i just copied the files and then on another floppy.

But then when i tried installing Serpent Isle, it gave me an error when trying to uncompress files, so i guess the "saved" files were damaged after all...

[Dominus]

I wrote in the 2nd post of this thread that just the contents are fine. The installation instructions in our docs for the floppy version also just uses the files of the floppies.

[RaptorZX3]

alright.

I'll get my 5.25" floppy drives this week probably, so i'll be able to scan them for errors and create backups of them if they're fine.

Otherwise, if some floppies are corrupt, and they're Ultima games, i might ask for help again here.


I think it would be awesome to create some kind of forum somewhere for vintage gaming and helping those who have corrupt disks to provide the files for them. Because the only sites i can find about vintage gaming are abandonwares sites where the games are already "installed" and cracked if they have protection, and you just have to unzip the content and play them in DosBox, which is pretty much "not enjoyable" for me because the time you take to install the game floppy after floppy make it so you want to enjoy the game much more while putting them in your drive, and watching the install process, and configuring your game afterward for sound and music, and joystick if available.

I do have games on CD-Rom because it's the better version of the game if it was available for sale on this medium (for example, King's Quest 5 and 6, fully voiced and better cinematics i think, where it's text only on floppy version)

[Dominus]

Ron the vogons forum, someone tried building up such a site with parity files, etc. Unfortunately it vanished

[RaptorZX3]

oh i see...i had this idea and wondered why i didn't see such a site around yet.

So as i posted before, Disk 4 and 7 of Serpent Idle are corrupt for me...hoping someone could help me.

Meanwhile, i hope other 5.25" disks from my games are alright.

[RaptorZX3]

i got my 5.25" floppy drives, and here's the result of what i would need in total:

-Ultima 7 (5.25"): Disk 1, 4 and 8
-Ultima 7 part 2 - Serpent Isle (3.5"): Disk 4 and 7
-Ultima Underworld - The Stygian Abyss (5.25"): Disk 2 and 4.

And for game not Ultima-related:

-AD&D - Curse of the Azure Bonds (5.25"): Disk B (2).



It really suck to get so many corrupt disks...but then again, i have to expect it since floppy disks have more chance of getting corrupt than CDs, hard disks and flash drives nowadays.

So i would like if one or more peoples could help me by providing me either images or "healthy" content of my corrupt disks please? I would still keep the original ones here, i will just add healthy floppies in the boxes with the right content in them.

[RaptorZX3]

As a proof, here are pictures (5) of the games, with a paper with my nickname written on it:
http://www.imagebam.com/gallery/lhammep ... fexy9iw3hi

[Dominus]

Can you take a picture of yourself holding a fish on your head with your nickname on a paper in its mouth? And of course the original disks in front of you...


I'll look for the SI disk content. Don't have the others in 5.25"

[RaptorZX3]

i managed to find a way to fix the Disk B of the AD&D game (i copied the floppy content on my desktop, grabbed the (only) problematic file from a ZIP file, placed this file with the other ones and placed the content on a healthy 5.25 360k floppy.)

Now it feel like it will be much harder to find peoples who can help me with my corrupt Ultima floppies...and i certainly don't feel like buying the floppies again.

[Pegbyter]

What amazes me is that you've still got floppy drives attached to your system at all... Most of those were completely phased out by the early 2000's. Apple has already phased out the internal optical drive (but offers it as an $80 external option).. Which means that that's next up for elimination; all in the hopes that everything will either be streamed online, stored in "the cloud", or stored on a usb flash drive.

[RaptorZX3]

i was able to find a "fix" for Ultima Underworld and 7, there's a place where the guy stored the actual floppy disk contents, and it seem to install and play well on my hard disk.

Not i just need to find a fix for disk 4 (Sidisk13, Sidisk20) and 7 (Sidisk31, Sidisk40) for Serpent Isle...

[RaptorZX3]

i'm still looking for those 2 disks' data to replacement my corrupt ones...and so far, nothing at all

[RaptorZX3]

i asked someone on Ebay who have it for sale, but he told me he can't verify the disks because he doesn't have a 3.5" drive anymore (yeah...like it's too hard to at least buy a 3.5" USB floppy drive to verify them...)

[Ray]

Sadly, I can't help with the image files, but I do have web space and web-design skills, so, since I know what a pain corrupted floppies are, I was thinking that creating a site with 25% parity files of old dos floppies would be useful...

Have you tried the rubbing alcohol & q-tip trick to try to salvage the disks?
1. Wet q-tip with rubbing alcohol, open the disk's "window" for 3.5". Re-wet any time it starts feeling "dry".
2. Note the alignment of the disk (non-centered notch in 3.5", and there is a small hole in 5.25" that can be used to gauge rotation), since that is the only way to measure a full circle, and rub up and down in the window with the q-tip while slowly rotating the disk.
3. Once you've gone all the way around once, flip the disk over and do the other side.
4. Wait for an hour or two to dry, unless you can get a good breeze into t he interior of the disk with a fan or something.

[RaptorZX3]

i just asked someone else on Ebay...and he want to charge me for those files, because of the "labor". Geez...i wonder how many days/months/years i'll be able to get the Disk 4 and 7's data to put back on 3.5" floppies...

[monotremata]

Dang man. Glad you got Curse worked out. Im not around as much as I used to be so I just saw your post asking for Disk B just now hehe.
Wish I could help you with the U7 stuff but my only copies of those I still own are in fact the UC cd which just basically has the entire thing already extracted into a directory ready to play. The two U7s have always gone for a little bit more on ebay then I want to pay so still dont have replacements of my originals yet.

If you can give me a list of the specific files you need Ill see if I can dig em out and send em to you?? Honestly the last time I installed the original multiple floppy version was in 1993 when I bought it so I cant remember if there was any weird disk spanning compressed files or anything but let me know and Ill try to sort you out..