I have disassembled and dedusted the disk drive and still get this error on an Commodore 64. Is it probable that the floppy diskettes are simply demagnetized by now? I am trying to recover some of dad's old essays and poems.
Edit: the error channel says READ ERROR
Edit2: the read head is not rusted. In fact, it looks like new. ๐
Tried both LOAD"*",8 and LOAD"$",8 on another ten or so disks, with the same file not found error.
Floppy discs and their drives are notoriously fragile.
I'd start with making sure that the drive head is clean and not rusted. Test on a new floppy disc.
I'd be very surprised if the standard LOAD command would still work, and I'd start with making a block copy of the disc(s).
You can access individual disc blocks from within BASIC, I wrote a disc editor at the time to do just that.
I'm going to start with this tomorrow and then read my C64 manual to try to find those block copy commands. Will the measly 64K of memory hold the copy/dump though?
In any case, thank you so much!
You'll likely need the 1541 user manual and the command you're looking for is BLOCK-READ. Have fun!
https://www.commodore.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/commodore_vic_1541_floppy_drive_users_manual.pdf