I have disassembled and dedusted the disk drive and still get this error on an Commodore 64. Is it probable that the floppy diskettes are simply demagnetized by now? I am trying to recover some of dad's old essays and poems.
Edit: the error channel says READ ERROR
Edit2: the read head is not rusted. In fact, it looks like new. ๐
Tried both LOAD"*",8 and LOAD"$",8 on another ten or so disks, with the same file not found error.
LOAD"*",8 just loads the first PRG file it finds on the disk, its like a shirt cut to using LOAD"$",8 and the LIST, then typing LOAD"nameoffile",8.
If LOAD"$",8 doesn't find anything it means the directory doesn't have a file listing, so could be damaged or empty.
But, if he was using a word processor (from another disk) then the poetry disk could be a save disk of the word processor and could be in a proprietary format, like one giant database or something that won't show as a regular directory list.
Or there is a slim chance he encrypted the work. I used to have a sentry program you ran first, and gave password before you could read scrambled content. I doubt it was that because we didn't really worry about encryption that much back then, it was more of a fun thing to try