| Field | Computers - TRS-80 |
| Went Obsolete | when disks got too big |
| Made Obsolete By | Complexity |
| Knowledge Assumed | Hex, the binary format of the disk - File allocation table |
| When useful | When ever the disk got corrupted (ie at least once a month) |
I recal using a program called SuperZap? on the TRS-80 to repair 90K and 180K 5.25 floppy disks where the File allocation table or even files were corrupted. This would happen either when the disk wasn't used in a while, not looked after quite right, or the drive itself was moved - or even when the weather changed too much.
The task of fixing the disk involved surfing around a hex dump of each page of the disk, comparing the contents of the File allocatio table to where files appeared to begin and end. As the disks where small enough, it was generally possible to recover most work.
Fun extra's were when using FORTH-80 or other variations of TSRDos?, NewDos? etc.
SuperZap? used to start with an ASCII animation of a wizard - anyone have a screen capture?
This is not a totally obsolete skill. SuperZap? on the TRS-80 may be long gone but tools still exist to do this on modern systems. Partition Magic includes a hex partition table editor that allows manual manipulation of partitions. I recently used it to reconstruct (with no data loss) an 80g 13 partition drive that accidentally had all of the partitions deleted. I've also used it to correct the sequencing of partitions, where the physical layout is misaligned with the sequence of entries in the partitoin table.