I have a set of old backup disks for a Sider ][ hard drive I had back in the 80s. I'd love to be able to extract the data, but I haven't been successful so far. Here's a little backstory for context:
The last time I had the Sider up and running was ~2003, when I set it up, for novelty sake, in my office while working at Apple . It booted up into davex fine, and everything seemed to be in order. In fact, Dave Lyons was working at Apple at the time so I emailed him a "support request" with my original customer number, etc. The disk held a bunch of stuff from my teenage years; email with friends, source code for a BBS I ran, the data files for the BBS, collected text files, etc. I thought it would be a good idea to back it up, and that's where things went horribly wrong. I can't remember what I did exactly, but I realized that I was writing to the Sider instead of reading from it -- starting at track 0. I think I realized it pretty quickly and either powered down the //e I was using, or hit reset or something. The result was a Sider ][ that no longer booted. I still have the drive, but I doubt it's in shape to try to rescue it. I did find a set of contemporary backup disks while going through my old floppies when I bought a CFFA3000 (?) and transferred everything I could to newer media. Fast forward to today, where I'm taking another nostalgia trip, and the focus of my attention is that set of backup disks (or .dsk files to be precise).
I've taken a look at them with hexdump in Terminal on my Mac, and have determined that the format looks very ProDOS-esque, but doesn't seem to be ProDOS. The data appears to be intact, since I can clearly see the text in text files and Applesoft programs. Does anyone know what the format was on these backup disks? Thanks!
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Rob