Reading data from a "misaligned" disk

[keithclark]

I have 3.5" damaged floppy disk that I'd like to recover from. The magnetic medium has separated from the metal hub because the adhesive that holds them together has broken down over the years. I've re-attached the magnetic part of the disk to the hub band tried to read the disk with fluxengine.

As you can probably guess, the disk isn't readable because the data isn't in the same place now but I have captured a flux recording. I was wondering, is there's a way to rebuild the misaligned disk data from the flux file?

[davidgiven]

It might be possible to recover this by using a drive which can microstep and reading the disk at 1/10th of a track intervals but I don't know of any which can do that. However, you could try doing multiple reads, adjusting the position of the hub by a tiny amount each time. The drive will pick up valid data for any tracks which happen to line up with the heads. As each read will read a different subset of the disk you may eventually get complete coverage. It's very much a long shot, though. If you want to do this, you probably want to use the --write-csv option to get low-level data about which sectors are valid (and write your own program to merge the resulting images).