Re: 5 inch floppies

From: Tony Nelson (tonynelson_at_georgeanelson.com)
Date: 09/03/05

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    Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 12:50:12 -0400
To: <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    At 10:55 AM -0500 9/3/05, Michael Hennebry wrote:
    >I'm trying to read some old (duh) 5 inch
    >floppies with a borrowed drive on an FC3 box.
    >Probabaly there is more than one format,
    >but I'm not sure which has which.
    >The usual result is that I can read the
    >directory by clicking on a KDE icon,
    >but get I/O errors when trying to read any of the files.
    >Trying to mount with a mount command also results
    >in an I/O error.
    >If I couldn't read the directory,
    >I'd suppose that I was out of luck.
    >Is there a reason that the directory
    >would be easier to read than the files?
    >Any ideas on how to read the files?

    I don't know how to solve your entire problem, but I suggest that you use
    dd to copy the entire contents of each floppy into a file, so that you
    don't wear them out, and so you know if the floppy data has been properly
    read. Once you find a solution to reading the floppy format, you can mount
    the image files over a loopback interface and work with then as if they
    were still on floppies, only faster and more safely.

    If the floppies are hard to read, sometimes just trying 50 times will
    succeed. This is another reason to try to get the data off them, as the
    process may tend to wear them out.
    ____________________________________________________________________
    TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@georgeanelson.com>
          ' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/> 

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