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Maybe this would work? http://www.kryoflux.com/

That kind of creative copy-protection is infamous, but for largely institutional or personal records, most people wouldn't have gone to that level of trouble just to obfuscate data. If they had, then we may miss out on some hidden data, but I don't think that argument alone can justify keeping around any type of storage medium that may have a timing trick, hidden filesystem, or other form of protection. At the same time, folks have developed functional technology to record timing information as well as bitstreams and sector information when creating a disk image, so if there were the type of tricks you describe they could be reverse-engineered later.

Personally, the biggest issue that I see when I have encountered this type of situation is that the original programs are on floppies. If this is the case, you will need to find somebody with a Windows/95 machine that they're keeping together with spit, bailing wire, gaffer's tape and good intentions - you should be able to copy the program onto a USB key and then burn it on a CD/DVD for more permanent storage.

3.5" floppies are no problem - although getting a bit scarce, it's still pretty easy to get USB-connected floppy drives. It's the 5.25" floppies that are hard. Although I didn't expect to need to do this, I recently found that life would be better if I could get a bunch of data that lives only in a few files of 5.25" floppies.

There are a number of solutions to this, but few are just plug-and-play. It also depends on whether you need to be able to read and write the floppy as an application would, or whether you just want to scrape the bits off and save them in some kind of container on another filesystem. (I was looking for IBM-format floppies, but realized while I was researching this, that this is probably the time to grab the data off my old Commodore floppies as well - I was surprised to find that many of these 5.25" interface solutions are capable of reading floppies from darn near anything - C64, Apple, Atari, Amiga, etc. As a result, a couple of these are C64-centric, and some are read-only.)

BTW - Lots of folks will say that disks this old cannot be read. IMO, you'd be surprised how often the data is intact even after decades. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that these older disks were considerably less dense in the first place, making them more resistant to the vagaries of time-based magnetic bit rot than newer more dense media.

Here is a rundown of what I found - this will no doubt be handy to anyone with the same problem:

http://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=30
http://store.go4retro.com/zoomfloppy/
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

FWIW I have three 8" floppy drives and am happy to help anyone try to recover their old 8" disks with a low-level read from a Kryoflux. Just ask on their forums.

If you're looking for 5.25" floppies, you should probably look into a versatile USB controller like the Kryoflux; that way you're not tied to particular motherboards, and you get a lot more versatility over what kinds of floppies and drives you can read.

There exists something called Kryoflux. I think what it does is makes a high-fidelity copy of the actual magnetic values of the disc, so you can make a very good copy on which you can work without worrying about degrading your floppies further.

http://www.kryoflux.com/

From the website, this is probably what you care about most:

Main Features
        Read at lowest level possible - precisely sampling the magnetic flux transition timing. Custom formats? Recording scheme violations? Encodings? KryoFlux reads them all!

check out the kryoflux

As far as I know, the Software Preservation Society [1] managed to acquire a great knowledge of diskettes mass replication techniques and developed an high resolution sampler controller (Kryoflux[2]) that permits disk imaging and reinterpretation of the read flux, often permitting to decode the original data stream when other standard controllers just give up and fail with an error. Recently, they added support for IBM PC disks. Please correct me if I provided wrong details. [1] http://www.softpres.org/ [2] http://www.kryoflux.com/

I had tons of old disks from my Amiga, Mac Plus and even Apple ][ days, and did a fair amount of hunting before finding Kryoflux... it uses a USB device as a 3.5 and 5.25 disk controller, and can read the disks at the lowest level the drive supports -- so it can, for example, read the old 400/800k mac disks that require the old apple multi-speed drives with a regular 3.5 PC drive. The blueprints for the board are available (to etch/build your own, but I think you need to create your own layout), or you can buy a prefab from them (when they have them in stock, anyway -- I had to wait a few months).

They have software that connects to the USB device and creates various decoded files for lots of archaic disk formats. They keep talking about opening the source code, but I haven't followed the latest developments there... software is free for non-commercial use regardless.

I managed to dump about 50 ancient disks from mac, apple ][ (5.25) and amiga without problems, and could use the images in various emulators to recover the files. I had a few disks with sectors that couldn't be correctly parsed, and lost a few files there, but overall I found the device a savior for my old writings and early coding projects.

They sell the devices at http://www.kryoflux.com/ or you can troll the forum link for the blueprints (I can dig it up if there's interest). Last I heard they were working on write support (and a quick check looks like that may be available now too).

Thumbs up here.

Scott

What method are you using to read them? If just a USB drive or an internal drive on a normal floppy controller, you might get better luck with a device such as the KryoFlux (if you are really determined to get that data back). It is a specialized floppy controller that records the timing of the flux reversals on the media, with the ability to sample a single track about 35 times in one pass, and retry many many times in an attempt to get everything. then software converts that to a usable disk image file.

If you are not interested on spending money on such a device, perhaps you could send the media to someone that has one. (Such as myself.)