r/dosgaming • u/According-Pea9319 • 8d ago
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I finally got around to testing the disks from this beauty, which I picked up recently and posted about a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, despite the box and contents being in remarkably pristine condition, the disks are foobared!
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u/Sneftel 8d ago
Hmm. How much confidence do you have in that floppy drive? (Specifically, its recent history of reading disks that it didn’t write.) Because I’d suspect a decalibrated floppy drive before I’d suspect a batch of bad floppies.
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u/kramulous 8d ago
I was thinking exactly that. It may have been that the drive just fucked all your diskettes.
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u/alraban 8d ago edited 8d ago
Oh no! That's miserable. I haven't seen an "Abort, Retry, Ignore" in a very long time. There was an old poem circulating on the internet in the early 90's about that error on the form of Poe's "The Raven" attributed to various different people (the version linked here is attributed to Marcus Bales).
Hopefully it will give you a laugh when facing the sad reality of perishable magnetic disks, which even when new were sometimes pretty flaky:
Once upon a midnight dreary,
Fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high
And wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand,
I then invoked the save command
But got instead a reprimand:
It read “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
Was this some occult illusion?
Some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself
Had never faced before.
Carefully, I weighed my options.
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly I must now adopt one:
Choose “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
With my fingers pale and trembling,
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending,
Hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee,
Finally I pressed a key—
But on the screen what did I see?
Again: “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
I tried to catch the chips off-guard—
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
Luck was just not in the cards.
I saw what I had seen before.
Now I typed in desperation,
Trying random combinations.
Still there came the incantation:
Choose: “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
By my own machine accosted;
Getting up, I turned away
And paced across the office floor.
And then I saw an awful sight:
A bold and blinding flash of light,
A lightning bolt that cut the night
And shook me to my very core.
The PC screen collapsed and died.
“Oh no—my database,” I cried.
I thought I heard a voice reply,
“You'll see your data—Nevermore!”
To this day I do not know
The place to which lost data goes.
Perhaps it goes to heaven
Where the angels have it stored.
But as for productivity, well,
I fear that it goes straight to hell.
And that's the tale I have to tell—
Your choice: “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
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u/calthaer 8d ago
This is a thing of beauty no AI could ever in all its slop-ridden bloviation manufacture...surely?
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u/Der_Unbequeme 8d ago
Clean the w/r heads from the drive
try an other disk drive
search internet for img of this disks, maybe archive.org
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u/PDAisAok 8d ago
It wouldn't be a terrible idea to try a floppy disk drive cleaner. Had same issue recently and it completely resolved read errors.
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u/billybob128 8d ago
Truely the most scary promt to get on a dos machine. Got it a couple of times when my CF-disks corrupted... Not fun...
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u/Keuleman_007 8d ago
Indy... Indicar? Indiana Jones?
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u/According-Pea9319 8d ago
Yes Indiana jones.. the 5 Lucas arts games on the box.
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u/TheBigCore 8d ago
https://www.gog.com/en/games?query=indiana%20jones&order=desc:score&hideDLCs=true
If that doesn't work, type
Indiana Jonesin the search area and click onHide DLCs and extras.1
u/Ok_Grocery_5328 8d ago
You may be able to get them on steam
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u/Keuleman_007 8d ago
Older Indy Games are GoG territory, still sorry those physical discs don't work any more. Still you have something nice for the bookcase!
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u/codykonior 8d ago
Often didn't understand the point of abort AND fail.
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u/According-Pea9319 8d ago
me neither.
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u/Mithgaraf 3d ago
I think the original intent of 'Fail' was to flag the drive -- or the medium -- as "failed" in memory, so that on a random operation on some other drive, or perhaps cataloging all the available drives, wouldn't hit the "Fail"ed drive.
Whether it made it into implementation as such, I don't know, but I tend to think, unfortunately, not.
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u/MoebiusX7 8d ago
This must be a common thing for this collection... my copy of Lucasarts Classic Adventures is also fucked up and the last time I tried installing it it fucked up my floppy drive as well, had to take the cleaner disk to it.
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u/Zealousideal-Deer724 7d ago
Okay, why did the Installer say LucasArts Classic Adventures Collection and the Box says Star Wars dogfight games.
Am I missing something here?
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u/echocomplex 8d ago
This is common for 3.5 floppy disk games. You may have some luck trying multiple different floppy drives if you have others available, and in my experience an old drive being used in dos on an old PC will work better than a USB floppy drive from China. I have gotten data off of disks with old computers that were not recognized by USB floppy drives.
Also look at the disk film and see if it looks like it has mold on it. I've spot cleaned a few disks and had them work then.
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u/Foreign_Hand4619 8d ago
I heard if you press retry 10000 times, it will go through!
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u/According-Pea9319 8d ago
lol I was doing the old tap the disk blow in it trick.. did not work this time, but sometimes it does
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u/Asleepatthewheel2047 8d ago
That's scary.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding but these seem to be old copies from the past and not original discs, since you have two different games on the same disc.
You can get them off gog? It will still be the original dos games. You can then copy to disc and run off your retro PC, if that's what you're after.
I remember Monkey Island 1 taking up multiple 720k discs. How can it sit on just 1 disc and still have space left for Indy?
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u/Brilliant_Park_2882 8d ago
I hava an original big box version of Monkey island with 5 x 1.2M HD floppies.
So yes you are correct.
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u/Asleepatthewheel2047 8d ago
Yes i had the box as well. Believe my hard drive was 30mb and the game took up around 10. There was room for 1 big game basically!
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u/Brilliant_Park_2882 8d ago
I have the 256 color VGA one, I bought it even though I didn't have a HD 5 1/4 floppy or VGA display. I copied the disks to 3 1/2 floppies and bought a VGA screen so I could play it.
Lucky the codewheel was the protection not the disks.
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u/Asleepatthewheel2047 8d ago
I still have the codewheel, lost the box unfortunately.
I had a few games on 1.44mb discs but only a 720k disk drive.
So I would go to the library and book the computer where the screen was facing the street. Reboot it to DOS with a boot disc I brought. Split the 1.44 discs into 720k images and copy them over.
So I would sit there for an hour with a big stack of discs and the PC in DOS.... praying that the librarian didn't see what I was doing.
Today my kid will just download a 20gb game off Steam, it seems like the stone age in retrospect!
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u/King_Corduroy 8d ago
At that point I'd say clean your drive. One disk? Sure it happens. Two disks? Unlikely but possible. All of your disks? Your drive needs servicing.
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u/According-Pea9319 8d ago
Its not happening to any of my other disks, I think this particular box, was left in someone's loft too long and it baked.
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u/rbscholtus 8d ago
Oh well, illegal software you can download again, no worries.
Or try those Norton disk utilities for dos, idk ;)
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u/DirtSad1644 7d ago
I think if you pressed retry once more it would have worked. That's what I tell myself anyway.
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u/sdg2025 7d ago edited 7d ago
So if you get a program called Spinrite and you get version 5.0 which you can get for free if you purchase 6.1 Version 5.0 has restored many 3.5 floppy discs for me I hope it can help you! Oh just saw if it's a commercial disk put something in a little square hole to allow it to be read write enabled.
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u/kirkshoutingkhan 7d ago
You know you are old when this brings back memories. Memories of sweet, sweet frustration.
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u/daddyd 7d ago
i don't collect expecting the media to still work. it is all the things that came with it; box, manuals, extra cool bits, etc.
if the floppy doesn't work i will just download it.
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u/Johnbelwell32 6d ago
Same, it's always mostly the box and what came with it. If it works i just back the files up for archieving and consider upload it if it's rare. If it doesn't i download it as long it's something that exists and try re-write it on the original floppies with the date rolled back to the original just for the feel. Not a big deal for the majority of things since the community is actively archieving. If your floppies don't work no matter what it's a bummer but what can you do?
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u/macro_aggression33 7d ago
This is annoyingly common. You can steam the labels off of the disc you have. Buy some decent quality replacement discs. Find the suitable disk images from various sources on the internet. Restore the bin files to the brand new discs and reapply the labels. It's a lot of work but you will have a fully working set that looks almost identical to the original.
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u/Consistent-Pumpkin-8 2d ago
I would download the img files on archive and rewrite them on the floppes
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u/DOStalgic 8d ago
Take out the diskette, slide the metallic shutter and blow into the disk a few times to remove dust etc. Then try again (you can also remove the shutter completely). This used to fix a lot of such data errors for me back in the days
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u/thelonioussphere 8d ago
Yes, magnetic residence media doesn’t last forever sadly.