I don't blog much, but I want to share the Open Source project I am actively working on:
RecoveryWhiskers is a the floppy disk data recovery software I am working on.
I started working on it after realizing I could not work around some of the shortcomings of the Greaseweazle software.
The Greaseweazle Host software
Not a great software for bad disks
At first I wanted to re-read bad floppy images. Greaseweazle doesn't allow it. I made some scripts that could stitch together bad images.
I hacked the software to show me the sectors that were read and which ones were missing. This helped a bit at first... until I got a batch of floppies in even more dire state.
The bad batch of floppies
How Greaseweazle looses data on bad disks
Once in a while I get a really bad batch of floppies. Those were most likely stored in a moist environment. There is mold and grime. This batch also had some nicotine build-up on the the media.
I had to clean the drive heads a lot. Sometimes I needed to eject the floppy quicky as I was hearing high pitched scratching noises.
At this point I prevented more damage on the floppy surface, but lost my data. Lost? The greaseweazle host software just crashed. No index pulse. This crashes the program. No image data was written.
I needed change that.
Can I hack it?
I considered fixing this in the Greaseweazle host software. But I quickly realized this isn't the way forward.
The crash I described is not the only problem. It is one of so many problems.
I had no idea what I was going into
I managed to nerdsnipe a good friend of mine to write a Rust Greaseweazle interface. This and a port of Greaseweazle's flux parsing algorithm (which stayed in a short while until I optimized out the floating point math) were boostrapping my software which I called RustWeazle as a working title.
A lot more to it..
There is a lot more to it but at the time of writing it's 2am and I will forget if I don't post it now.
I'll try to write more about how (and why) I reinvented a lot of wheels making RecoveryWhiskers and why I didn't use existing implementations.
Please don't support AI code projects. Please don't buy projects using AI "art". Share and support more art and cool projects. All my projects, my art and my open source projects are made by me, not with a slop bot.