🚀 go-pugleaf

Pedram wrote:

> Hi
> He is talking about bad SECTOR and its also my question how could I
> read or write a physical or logical sector !! :-?

That's what my solution does.

Open the device using CreateFile() and read it using ReadFile(). Don't
be put off by the word 'file' in the function names. Read the help and
you'll find that CreateFile() can create a lot more than just files and
in fact doesn't always create things. It should have been called
OpenObjectForAccess() or somesuch.

I've spent the last thirteen years developing data recovery software so
I know /exactly/ how to read bad sectors from faulty media :)

As regards working around bad sectors on floppy disks it depends what
you want to do. If you just want to replace their content with '*'
during reading then pay attention to the error code returned by
ReadFile(). For performance reasons you need to be reading multiple
sectors at a time initially (multiple of sectors per track would be
good but not essential). This means that if you get an error you have
to drop down to single sector reading (ie;ask for 512 bytes at a time)
so that you can repeat the request to find out which part of the
original bigger read had a problem.

If you actually want to try and get the underlying data (ie;ignore CRC
errors) then things get more complicated. Sometimes ReadFile() returns
the FDC data anyway, othertimes it doesn't.

My advice (based on how few people even use floppy disks these days) is
to forget about it and just fill your buffer with '*'s on error. If
you're tring to recover data from a floppy disk search the web for
imaging/recovery tools that someone else has written.

-- 
Andrue Cope [TeamB]
[Bicester, Uk]
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html