Linux – Old Technologies About Floppy

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I have a floppy disk with an unknown FS-(FileSystem). I want to make a copy from it but I can't because both Windows and Linux seem to be unable to read from it.

I tried many of the most popular apps to make image files (for example isomeric, winimage, …) but they are all unable to make an image.

On Linux I tried the dd command to copy it but it seems that not even dd is able to make a copy. I get many errors while reading from the disk, I looked them up and I found that dd was unable to read from it because of a bad sector – but when I test this floppy on the HITACHI system it works fine and I don't get any error.

The question is: how can I make a copy from this type of floppy? I've heard I can use a BIOS interrupt for this kind of things?

Best Answer

If dd and other raw read utilties don't work, it's highly likely that the disk sectors are bad - in which case no method of reading (BIOS interrupts or otherwise) will work.

How did you determine that the test on a Hitachi system "works fine"?

You could try the "noerror" option with dd to read the disk, but you'll only get partial data if read errors occur.

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Restoring ancient zip file spanning floppy disks: pkzipfix equivalents

I had some partial success and was able to get some files out of the archive. First, I created an "fd" directory to mount those floppy images, then for each floppy image, I did the following:

sudo mount -o loop floppyxx.img fd
cat fd/myzip.zip >> combined.zip
sudo umount fd

Once I had a combined archive, I did this:

unzip -FF combined.zip

There are fewer files I was able to extract than I'd hoped. I'm still open for seeing if there's a more effective method of repairing a multi-disk zip archive.

Reading old 5.25″ floppies

5 1/4" disks were notorious for losing data. Don't need to store them near a magnetic field, they can self-demagnetize. The next problem is that tracks are located by a stepper motor. This means that you might actually need the original drive that wrote them in order to read them. Tape drives and floppy drives go out of tolerance as they wear. Conversely, they could have been written in a drive that was dead on in calibration, but your current drive is out of spec despite the supposed refurbish and can't read them.

I'd find someone with a known working 5 1/4" drive and see if they can read them. This will tell you if your drive is dead. You've done the only other thing I can recommend and that was to try a different drive and cable. As long as you got the arrow, red stripe and pin 1 lined up on the motherboard header socket (important for the ones that didn't have a key), it was relatively hard to hook up anything wrong on the 5 1/4 drives with the edge connector. 3 1/2" drives were notorious for getting things connected up wrong.

Best Answer

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Restoring ancient zip file spanning floppy disks: pkzipfix equivalents

Reading old 5.25″ floppies

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