reading ancient floppy formats

[Fernando Cassia]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 6:01 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
> I want to rescue the contents of some old floppy disks.  They are 5.25
> inch quad-density with a 7th edition UNIX filesystem on them.
>
> The normal way to select the appropriate floppy drive configuration is
> to select the right device node.  The closest is /dev/fdnh720, but that
> isn't quite right (I need 10 sectors per track).  So I think that I
> need the setfdprm command.
>
> Unfortunately, the setfdprm command was dropped from Fedora around
> Fedora Core 6.  Here's the changelog entry from util-linux
>
> * Tue Aug 16 2005 Karel Zak <kzak at redhat.com> 2.13-0.2.pre2
> ...
> - removed: elvtune, rescuept and setfdprm
>
> Does anyone know why this command was removed?  Perhaps the device
> driver no longer had the necessary functionality.
>
> Is there a newer better way to read my disks?
>
> Gene: this might be a question for you.  I see you posted something to
> the kernel list about setfdprm a couple of years ago.
>  http://groups.google.ca/group/linux.kernel/msg/d7d3259d9a8fca2e?hl=en

Have you tried what happens if you run Fedora Core 6 in a Virtualbox VM?

FC