Restoring ancient zip file spanning floppy disks: pkzipfix equivalents

floppyms-dospkzipzip

I'm about to attempt something odd, and before I wasted time going down the wrong paths, I thought I'd see if anyone here has done this before. I have a zip file created in DOS (in 1997?) with pkzip that is spanning several old floppy disks. As expected, some of these disks aren't in the best shape, and I get read errors when trying to copy contents off some of the disks. Is there a pkzipfix equivalent that I can use to restore some of the content of this zip file?

Here's what I'm going to attempt first, but I don't know if this will be fruitful:

  1. Connect a floppy disk drive to my Linux box.
  2. Create disk images of the floppies on my hard drive like this: cat /dev/fd0 > floppyxx.img
  3. See if someone has ported PKZIP to Linux and see if I can use these disk images. If not, look for Windows port (and maybe connect a floppy drive to that Windows box).

Has anybody here embarked in this type of adventure before and successfully restored an ancient archive like this?

Best Answer

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.

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