Recovering data from S950 formatted floppy disks

As I'm going thru my disks I see a lot have bad data errors , I figure the best way to get around this is to get an external floppy disc drive and use free recovery software so I can extract everything on the disks except obviously the bad data. My question is should I just get a unit on Ebay ( only 20 to $25.00) I have a Mac if I format the drive for mac will it be able to read the S950 samples on the disks???

ralphiedee wrote:As I'm going thru my disks I see a lot have bad data errors , I figure the best way to get around this is to get an external floppy disc drive and use free recovery software so I can extract everything on the disks except obviously the bad data. My question is should I just get a unit on Ebay ( only 20 to $25.00) I have a Mac if I format the drive for mac will it be able to read the S950 samples on the disks???

There's no recovery software that you'd be able to run off of a USB drive that will accomplish what you want to do.

Didn't you mention in another thread that your other S series sampler could read those S-950 disks, it's just that your S-950 itself has issues with reading those disks?

Also formatting the disks for Mac doesn't make sense either. You're talking about an Akai S-950 sampler, which utilized its own format, 4 decades prior to the existence of the Mac format you were mentioning above.

OK back to this question: A lot of my disks give me bad data errors, I'll get two or three samples off them . I also tried to read on a S3000 and same thing ( I may have mentioned that already)

I need to know what format the audio samples on the Akai were in, I believe .snd? If so can't I get an external floppy disk drive and be able to see the files on the Akai formatted floppy off my Mac?

Seems possible , so I would then copy the data and convert from .snd to wav ( there are converters that do this for free. Even though I may not get all the data it would be worth it to try to salvage some , no?

Plz advize

Thx

R

OK update on this situation. All of my disks were formatted in the S950 . If I pop a disk in the 950 I turn the power off and on so it automatically loads the disk but some will give me bad data error. I do the same thing loading the same disk in the S3000. So in both cases I have to try to load each sample manually. This will lead to tons of time and if I have to do I will but I mentioned in one of the last posts and want to make sure if I can go another route, that is to get a floppy disk drive Mac compatible. Now the question is if I load one of the S950 disks in that mac compatible drive , WILL IT SEE THE S950 DATA?


R

I previously stated that it would not be able to read the data.

Try and understand that a "Mac" floppy drive still makes no sense, it won't change anything in your situation.

the only thing you could try is making a low level copy / image of the floppy and writing that to a new disk
-of course, you'd be copying errors too - but still worth a try i guess
once you have the image you could also try to access it through software that can read these propriety format (floppy) disks

more intel on creating images from floppies on MAC (is for Roland S-series floppies but works for AKAI floppies too):

https://llamamusic.com/s50s550/Mac_Supp ... ks.html#C5