5 inch floppies

[Tony Nelson]

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.
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