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Comment by simmons | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I was recently able to recover some Apple IIe/Mac 800K floppies for a relative using a KryoFlux board [1] and a regular PC floppy drive. I was glad to have that option, since I sure don't have any vintage Apple 800K drives lying around!

[1] https://www.kryoflux.com/

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Kryoflux is amazing. I have found the best way to get good images is to get a few different old floppy drives (you can find them pretty cheap on amazon or ebay) and take images with a few of them. You will find that each drive has different bad sectors in the images. You can then patch together good sectors from the different drives to create a full, complete image.

I was able to get a lot of disk images from disks that were failing to read fully on ANY of the drives, but were failing in different sectors.

Same here. After my Amiga died I wanted to move to emulation, but I found a lot of my disks had died (I had moved to WHDload years before this so they haven't been used in a long time) and I was heart broken. A friend told me about Kryoflux and it worked flawlessly for them. It's only very rarely that I haven't been able to read a disk with it and most of them were super cheap 2000's era shitty disks. It's a utterly lifesaving and magical device.

+1 for Kryoflux. I used them to backup all my old Mac floppies. Once you've got the raw images, you can even use an emulator like Mini vMac to use the floppies on your modern hardware. I've done so successfully.

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