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Retrocomputing

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    Its theoretically possible you could even recover data from a disk with damaged sector information if you used one of the modern USB-connected micro-controller based drives that doesn't rely on the traditional floppy interface standard internally, although that would require some custom firmware on the drive and probably a custom driver on the computer to allow you to read in an entire track at once. Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 8:12
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    This gets Off-Topic: Most contemporary floppy drives cannot be logically considered "floppy drives", but rather logical block devices ("USB-sticks") that just happen to store logical blocks on a floppy in the same physical format as the IBM PC. This physical format is built into a µC on the device and cannot be changed - That is why these drives can't normally use disks in, for example, Acorn RISC or Amiga formats. What the µC can do in case of errors is just stubbornly re-try until it eventually gets the sector with no error. But that has nothing to do with error correction. Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 9:14
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    @mnem You wouldn't need custom firmware on the drive - Standard drives already can do what needs to be done (stepping in-between sectors). Specific software not using a standard disk conmntroller can read the modulated data stream from a disk directly and record that. The host computer can then decode whatever it gets from there. That is what, for example, the KryoFlux device does. It is, however, impossible to detect any errors from the raw bits - Error detection then needs to be done by the host computer. Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 9:23
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    @mnem Devices like Kryoflux, however, will obviously still not be able to read anything from a disk that is no longer there - They are not intended as data rescue devices, but rather as a reader of formats that are not supported by standard floppy disk controllers. Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 9:33
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    @tofro I didn't intend to mean that you could recover corrupted data that way, just pull in the "raw stream", as you say, to get around corrupted sector markers and read the rest of the uncorrupted data. I meant that it should be theoretically possible to reprogram the µC on a modern USB floppy to make it function similar to the KyroFlux, etc. Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 9:42