Hi guys, as a Christmas present to myself, I recently hired a data recovery service to try and recover data from the old defunct nonworking HDD from my first computer circa 1993. The recovery service had better luck than I had with my amateur data recovery efforts, and they sent over a file list to show what they recovered from the drive. Judging from the file types, some of my old Stunts tracks were recovered!
The catch is, that the HDD partition was damaged and the recovery included recovering a mix of good files and damaged/partial files. I'm yet to receive my recovered data back, but looking at the stunts files I've seen in the file listing, the vast majority of the stunts track files have messed up names, such as "_rack1" instead of "track1", which is a nomenclature I've seen before when recovering damaged (and ultimately nonworking) files from floppy disks. So I assume many of my stunts tracks will be among the damaged/partial files from the recovery.
When I get the files back (in a few days), I will certainly test them and may upload them here, but I guess I'm wondering - if I have a partial file, might there be any conceivable way to repair it so that I could see what remains of it within Stunts? Like maybe combining the data I have from the partial file with data from a working stunts track? In any case, I suppose I'll check that out to see what can be done. Expecting to actually have the data back in a few days...
Quote from: dukeofurl on December 13, 2025, 03:11:35 AMif I have a partial file, might there be any conceivable way to repair it so that I could see what remains of it within Stunts?
Valid track files from Stunts should all be 1802 bytes. Hard drive sectors at the time were around 512 bytes, if I remember correctly. So four sectors to a track: partially recovered files are possible.
If your tracks are incomplete, there'll be a sector missing, could be terrain or track. You'll need a bit of guesswork to understand which chunk is missing, an hex editor to fill it with zeros, and then we'll see what Bliss or Stunts make of it ;D
OK! I got the files back today. I sorted all the stunts tracks/highscores etc into a directory. Some of the names seem messed up but there are also files that don't have messed up names.
Anyway I tried to load about 10 of them, including several with good looking file names, and a few with bad ones, and none of them worked, and they either wound up freezing or crashing stunts and/or dosbox so things aren't looking too great lol. Not sure how to edit these in a hex editor to try and make them somewhat loadable, but I'm throwing them up here in case anyone wants to play around with recovering these to a semi useable state :) They might also just be junk data at this point? Some of the files recovered from this drive, such as ordinary readme.txt files included with software just show up as gibberish when they are opened... however there are some good working files as well...
Anything that might become loadable that appears to be an incomplete track, I'll happily try to finish into something complete-able.