Back to CHUNKFILE to start on DATA1 on the Southern side.

If the copying of the Northern side of the disc had been relatively smooth, if time-consuming, then the Southern side was most troublesome.

Unfortunately, I came across a large number of errors when copying the three big files from the Southern side of the disc. With a process of polishing the disc and a bit of mindless optimism, I did manage to copy practically all the data from the disc.

It was during this frustrating and repetitive process that the beauty of the features I had built into CHUNKFILE came into good use. By recording the file offset on a little slip of paper, and adjusting the memory buffer used by CHUNKFILE, I could resume from errors by re-starting from the beginning of the particular chunk and copying up to a point just before the error occurred. This appeared to work fairly well, as fewer errors seemed to occur if the copying began just before a previously bad sector.

This took three or four days and I was able to get within the final 400K of the big files before I had to abandon the process since I just couldn't get any further.

About two weeks later I was able to borrow a Community Disc from Richard Gellman and finish the copying. As a result of the errors I encountered, CommunityS is in rather more chunks than I would have hoped but it's all there!

I did embark on copying the National Disc. There is only one side with data on the National Disc but at just over 215MB, it's the biggest disc surface by far.

Regrettably I didn't even get the first chunk of any of the big files copied due to recurring disc errors, so National Disc Data Rescue has had to be postponed until another time!