Linux – Read (repair) data from broken floppy disc on a linux system

file-recoveryfloppyforensicslinux

How can i read an old floppy disk under Linux that has some problematic sectors?
In times of DOS people used magic tools like Norton Disk Doctor and others.

Some of these tools read the broken part many times until they had success. Others used more intelligence. As far I remember some of these tools could repair nearly every broken file after some time.

I tried dd if=/dev/fd0 of=001.img but it stops with an error message
dd_rescue continues the job, but the image is not readable afterwards.

How can I recover the files from a very old floppy with Linux tools?

Best Answer

testdisk should help with this. It's an opensource multiplatform data recovery software.

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First the caveat, I don't think this will meet your incremental requirement, and I'm not sure about the RAID compatibility. But I have played with Clonezilla a little and as a guided solution with plenty of documentation I think it is at least worth checking on.

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.

Best Answer

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