The Dreaded Read/Write Error and Disk Doctor - Amiga



The Dreaded Read/Write Error and Disk Doctor
Article originally published April 17th, 2016

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Imagine you’re playing your favorite game on the Amiga. You’ve been at it for an hour and you’ve just triggered a cut scene which requests that you insert disk 3. You eagerly oblige and await the change of scenery. A sound tingles your senses and an entire array of emotions jolts through your body. You’ve heard that sound before… You know what the Amiga is about to say even before it does…


Your disk has a read/write error. The floppy drives sound let you know this two seconds before the system told you. The Amiga floppy drive always had a unique sound. It’s the reason why I don’t seek out alternatives to using it other than the occasional game that can be installed on a hard drive. I want some games to run off a floppy disk because that drive’s sound beats any computer ever made. But the floppy drive is not all joy… There is a sound that can bring your mood from 100 to 0 in less than a second. That sound is the read/write error sound, and it still haunts me.

^The Game Civilization Puts Up A Read/Write Error

Basically a read/write error means that the Amiga was unable to read or write to the disk. It seems to go back and attempt to read/write again, which is where this unique sound comes from I imagine. The reason this sound invokes so much emotion and pain is because anyone that heard it knows that disk is dead. If you’re lucky the error will only come up when attempting to read a certain file, thus you still have access to certain areas of the disk like your saves. It seems more often than not the Amiga simply made the disk off limits to you. All of your progress is stuck on that disk, perhaps nothing wrong with it, but you can’t access it.

^Not A DOS Disk Equals Forget About Seeing Anything On That Disk

In retrospect I’m sure the cause of most of these errors was a dirty disk drive. I implore you all to keep that drive healthy. Buy a floppy drive cleaner and download a program that will make the floppy go through all the tracks to clean the heads. I threw out half of my original games around 2000 because they simply didn’t work… Or so I thought. Upon fixing up my Amiga several years ago I found several games I was sure were dead still worked. Keep those drives clean!

But cleaning won’t always work. Sometimes the disk is truly dead. Is there anything we can do for it? Commodore themselves had a solution for you with the Workbench utility known as Disk Doctor.


Running Disk Doctor from a CLI/Shell would attempt to repair the corrupt areas of your disk. It would go track by track looking for these errors while reporting the information to you.


Upon finishing with the disk it would “replace” the files that had been on the disk. Rather than replace anything I kind of think it simply told the Amiga it was allowed to read them again. Before running disk doctor you might get the error upon inserting the disk into the drive, meaning there was simply no way to read anything of the disk. After running disk doctor we could now (with any luck) be able to see the files that are on the disk and copy them over to a good disk.

^Disk Doctor Finishes Successfully And Shows The Files Saved



^Using Disk Master I Copied The Files To Another Drive

I said with any luck because Disk Doctor was not the greatest utility in terms of batting percentage. I would later hear rumors that something was wrong with Disk Doctor from the moment Commodore put it on Workbench. They ended up getting rid of the program with version 2.0 of Workbench. Of 4 disks I tried using Disk Doctor on, only one of them allowed me to retrieve any data from it. On the plus side, that one disk contained saves my father made from back in the day. Information which previously was lost and now perhaps I’ll be able to have some fun with that.

There are now better utilities to deal with read/write errors, but this was a look down memory lane. To this day whenever I hear the Amiga’s floppy drive make that noise I instantly perk up and hold my breath. It is a primal fear that is forever with me. I should note this write up was for nostalgic reasons and I do not endorse the use of Disk Doctor to fix your disks. There are many other utilities available which perform much better. Try DiskSalv or another utility as Disk Doctor is just not good enough to use for your precious files. I may one day do a complete guide with the proper programs to use, this was just to look back.

To hear the sound and see me using DIsk Doctor please check out my companion video on this subject here.

"The Disk Doctor....call him when your discs are dying......but he'll only save them about 25% of the time...because he's not very good at his job." :) – YouTuber Brian Davis in reply to my video.

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