NeXT Computers

serstad · Joined: 30 Nov 2015 Posts: 1

Been meaning to get around to this for a while and found this group.

Age-old story: I have a couple 3.5" floppies that I found in my stack of stuff. Since they say Next on them, my brilliant mind has deduced that they are my data disks from when I used the two Next computers that we had at our college (it was the cool thing to do). All of my other floppies from that era were readable on a Windows XP machine I had laying around but these aren't.

Would someone be interested in letting me mail them to you and see if anything is readable from them? And then uploading contents to a OneDrive or Dropbox for me? Maybe worth a Starbucks gift card or a donation to favorite charity or something?

Nothing of critical importance on the disks - just a few letters I remember writing and some papers, etc.

Thanks!

pitz · Joined: 14 Aug 2006 Posts: 122 Location: Oregon, USA

bobo68 · Joined: 03 Jun 2015 Posts: 193 Location: Germany

You can send the floppies to me if you live in Europe. Sending them over the pond is probably too much, isn't it?

That said, I'm pretty sure one can read the floppies with NeXTStep installed in VMware or Parallels on a Mac and a half decent USB floppy drive. I could give it a try if you want.

barcher174 · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 554

I also wouldn't mind doing this for you if the emulator doesn't work out. I'm in California.

tomaz · Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 149 Location: Sark

Do the floppies have any bad sectors? I have a recovery program which I wrote for 1.44MB floppies that can be used on any computer with a USB port using a USB floppy drive. It can also deal with some bad sectors, as long as each sector is eventually readable. I have a similar program that runs on a NeXT for 2.88MB floppies. I think there are similar programs available on the net (ddrecover?). You need to dump each sector multiple times and compare the reads, as there is often silent data corruption. For floppies with too many bad sectors to restore normally, I have a KryoFlux drive. Once you have a sector dump, you can mount NeXT floppies on MacOSX using AncientFS. I can try to make a sector dump for you.