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Ask Slashdot: Recovering Data From 20-Year-Old Diskettes?
First time accepted submitter Zilog writes "The end of the 3.5-inch floppy and the disappearance of associated drives showed to me the need to backup the tens of diskettes that accompanied my youth. Carefully preserved, these diskettes have proved readable for the most part — while some are approaching 20 years old. However, some diskettes have shown surface defects in areas with compressed archives (zip). Any ideas on how to recover (as much as possible) these bad sectors?"
OR you could just download new porn.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Didn't Iomega have a utility that came with the JAZZ drive?
It's expensive, but you could consider giving spinrite a try.
Grc.com
Find an old copy of norton disk doctor and use it to do bad sector recovery on those disks. I remember it working pretty well back in the day.
don't
I got these and a couple of formerly high end VHS machines out of storage (finally) that's been there since Katrina. The storage was climate controlled.
Anyway, the players seemed borked right now...so, so much for my plan to try to play them through these boxes into a video capture card. I really want to mostly capture all of the whole tapes of many of these...some 6-8 hour tapes.
I'd like the raw footage...then try to edit it down for DVD's to send out to old friends for maybe new years this year.
Any suggestions on this? Are there any pro-places that don't charge an arm and a leg to copy off VHS to DVD or bluray?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
He hooked his own analog-to-digital converter up to the read-head and post-processed the heck out of it to recover the data.
http://chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
If you can find one use a Superdisk to read a floppy. The heads are much more sensitive and narrow and can read ordinary floppies better than a regular floppy drive. I have used this to recover data from floppy disks that were old/worn.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
About a year ago a friend gave me a floppy disk and asked if I could get the data off of it with a floppy drive I had laying around. I tried the obvious approach: drag the files off using whatever file browser I was using. This failed because of at least one bad sector, and so I lost one file of about seven.
I attempted to work around this by writing my own file copier that attempted to read the file in question in byte segments. This was not effective (though it narrowed down the bad bytes), nor was it acceptable for the file format, and there were too many missing to guess the pattern, so I tried to read in smaller and smaller segments until one night I just let it read it byte by byte, which was an incredibly slow process. Unfortunately, that did not work either, and it really did not work much better than just reading in small-ish segments of bytes.
While it did not work for me, as I was working with an old, proprietary binary file, it may work pretty well if it only mashes up some of your words in a word document or even a flat text file.
I'm still holding on to my C64 disks. I don't know if the data is any good, but there's no way I'm getting rid of them.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then
dd_rescue /dev/fd0 /$SOME_WHERE/$fILE_NAME
My karma is not a Chameleon.
They won't ever work again. Too floppy.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Image the disk and use a zip repair tool. seriously wha's on/these that are so important? Abandonware sites for software that old.
This seems more of a yahoo question, how does stuff get accepted nowadays?
Now if somebody can tell me how to modify an appleII drive to connect to a pc ... that's a slashdot question.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I know this has been discussed before, but it really begs the question of how to preserve digital data for long periods of time. Stone tablets last for thousands of years; paper for hundreds (or more, if in climate-controlled storage). What have we got for (large amounts of) digital data?
Loading...
Clean and align the drive first, before you screw up any (more) disks.
To give an analogy that kids now a days can easily understand, its like trying to insert an old fashioned flash drive into a USB port full of peanut butter. It might work, it might even work most of the time, but it'll work better if its clean.
Due to the digital capture effect or whatever, you might only need one dB more signal or one dB less noise to go from a sector having a read error somewhere every time you read it, to having an errorless read.
If you have way more time and/or money than you know what to do with, you break out the oscilloscope and align the drive to that individual disk/track. Yes this takes a lot of time and gear, but if you really gotta do it... Basically you align to best SNR on that individual disk rather than to an alignment disk. If the drive that wrote the disk was technically out of alignment, this will save you. If the drive that originally wrote the disk was in perfect alignment, then this is a waste of time.
At the very least, clean the freaking drive. Using kimwipes and undenatured pure ethanol on the heads. You drink some ethanol as a toast to the computing gods after success or failure, doesn't matter which, either way you're doing a shot or its bad luck and the next disk will shed its oxide for sure. Everclear is supposedly pure enough to clean drive heads, and supposedly its drinkable. All I remember from my only experience with everclear was yelling some lines from a cartoon and throwing up, and there are disks I have not been able to recover, so take my cleaning solvent suggestion with a grain of salt. Kimwipes are hard to explain and may no longer be manufactured, but they used to be like a dustless, lintless fabric q-tip, at least in concept, sorta. I don't mean they were like a q-tip in that they were of a certain dia, length, and color, but more the general idea of a perfect cleaning fabric at the end of a non-conductive stick.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
just grab a cotton ball and some rubbing alcohol and (lightly and gently) rub all that brown stuff off.
GNU ddrescue.
Please help metamoderate.
If you can find an old (pre-Symantec) copy of Norton Utilities, it's Disk Doctor (NDD) program was very good at recovering floppies.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
There are various data recover apps out there for this purpose. The problem is complicated by files being zipped. it is possible to dump the files as binary images then manually edit the binaries of the individual files in a hex editor etc. so that the can be read by software that works with a given format. However, I'm not sure if or how well that will worked with compressed files. Are they encrypted as well?
The problems are not 'unsolvable' but can very quickly move into the realm of needing a supercomputer and a other specialized equipment.
There are of coarse companies that do this professionally and charge $$ for it , how much are the files worth.
following are few things that might help out. Good luck.
http://content.dell.com/us/en/slgov/slg-solutions-digital-forensics.aspx?ST=forensics%20recovery%20software&dgc=ST&cid=69093&lid=1744642&acd=snYi17OBJ,7688660482,901rb36697
http://www.x-ways.net/
http://www.winhex.com/winhex/
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
My (short) experience with floppies has been that being near even a mobile phone or speaker kills the data on them.
The floppies mentioned are 20yrs old, how come they havent gone bad yet?
This is a COMPLETELY different problem. There was no basic difficulty in recovering the flux transistions on the Cray disk pack,
which is the problem that this guy has.
If you can't get good sector data, you have no hope of recovering something that has been compressed without
error correction built in.
I'd be happy to hear about an error recovery process for corrupted ZIP archives.
Write a copy tool that fills in all possible bit combinations for the bad sectors and spits out 100s of zip files instead of just 1. At a max of 1.44MB/zip file, it still shouldn't be much space in modern terms. Then just try to decompress them all and see what the results are.
These are custom disk readers that support a wide variety of formats and have advanced recovery options.
They've been used to read data off all kinds of ancient and obscure home computer formats, some of it decades old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project
The technology is also available to the public, I believe, but I would guess it isn't cheap.
Also the amounts of data aren't as large as traditional media.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Some diskettes were made with an oxide binder that softens with time (basically, it absorbs moisture). I've seen old diskettes where the oxides came off on the first try leaving the head coated and at least one track of the disk destroyed.
Anyway, I've heard of people actually capturing head output so they can rebuild missing data by analyzing the output better than the average floppy controller can.
Load a version 6.2 of DOS in a VMware window, run ndd a: /complete.
Viola!
Or Scandisk a: /autofix /all
http://www.kryoflux.com/ from amiga community
Believe it or not, I still have 8 inch Dysan media here. I'm sure there's data still on them, but since I haven't needed them since the early 80's, I'm sure I don't need the data anymore.
And they were for my CP/M machine.
I miss those days.
Scandisk works on floppies as well as hard drives.
What I found was:
Zip Repair
ZipSnap21(Don't remember whether I actually used this)
For creating recoverable archives, i found
MultiParchive
But using it didn't really stick with me.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The good news is that as I recall, floppy disk records have a CRC appended. The bad news is that my sometimes faulty memory tells me that MSDOS floppy disk drivers used the CRC to correct reads and didn't tell the user that the record did not read properly. I think that means that any record reported as being in error has at least two errors. But maybe I'm wrong.
Sometimes using a different drive helps.
I do seem to recall that it was sometimes possible to read a faulty record multiple times and patch the record back together using DEBUG. There's probably software somewhere that automates that process.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
VGAcopy, blow, repeat
Use an old computer with an actual floppy drive controller, don't USB it - and make sure it's not TEAC
You can even still recover 20 year old disks that have NO DISK PROTECTORS. You can even still recover 30 year old floppies. I did that just a month ago.
This history is very wonderful for me.
www.creativetemplate.net
what you need is an electron microscope and a few bottles of Tequila. In reality you don't need the microscope of-course, Tequila is enough.
You can't handle the truth.
Are you using new/clean hardware, or a 3.5" Toshiba drive that was manufactured in 1990 and which has spent at least a decade actively playing the role of dust collector?
Myself, I've have had far better luck with old floppies than old floppy drives.
So as a first step, I'd try different hardware and see what that accomplishes. And any old hardware really should be at least partially disassembled, cleaned thoroughly, and oiled appropriately.
The second step would be calibration. There are two very different ways to do this: Calibrate the drive to what it should be (there are kits+software for this), or calibrate it to what produces the best signal with a particular disk (requires an oscilloscope and a bit of a clue).
Done this way, you might well find that your data can be perfectly restored, which will eliminate the need to guess at what the missing bits might be.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.)
You might have some luck if you try the disks in one or more different drives. The head alignment and other small factors like that are unique to each drive. Usually they are close enough that a freshly formatted disk will work in most other drives. But when there is a small defect in how it was recorded to the disk (power surge, controller glitch, etc) or a small media defect, then a different drive may have better (or worse) luck. I've seen my fair share of disks that will read fine in one drive but not another.
Be sure to clean any dust out of the drive and use a head cleaning disk before using it if it is old.
Also keep any partial initial copies you retrieve from a damaged disk - it is completely possible that it's condition may worsen as you continue to try and retrieved data from it.
And despite what others may say, keeping the archives in a zip file is a good thing. You know for sure if you files are intact or not. Floppy disks can often "successfully" read a sector only to have it contain gibberish. You can try running a zip recovery utility to like pkzipfix to recover any undamaged files inside a corrupt archive.
I would also recommend copying the files off using DOS (Win 9x DOS 7.1 can copy to FAT32 hard drives). From my experience most protected mode drivers are less forgiving on errors than real mode DOS.
I still have an ST-225 hard drive (20 megs) sitting in a box somewhere in the house. It's from the early 90s. I have a few letters from college on there that might be interesting to read again. I always said I'd find time or money to do recovery; but one or the other is always in short supply.
See this howto at Wendy Carlos' blog. She recovered the original Tron soundtrack this way.
Magnetic media like tapes and floppies use a binder (glue) that becomes corrupted with moisture over time, allowing the metal-oxide particles to flake off. Dehydrating the media can reverse the condition if you haven't already tried to access it.
Hmmm, what could possibly be interesting on 20 year old floppies (that cant be found on some abandonware site) ?
I think you need SpinRite. It's important for disks to be read once in a while, to "re-magnetize" disk surface; the same goes for your hard drives.
These disks are much more resilient than people think. I routinely read 30+ year old TRS-80 disks for people. Check for physical dust/defects (can remove with soap/water on a cue tip). The old PKZIP had a utility called PKZIPFIX which might get SOME data off. There are add-on FDC's such as an old adaptec or even a catweasel (google them).
One of my colleagues is set to retire next year. He still has a big square plate of magnetic core memory in a frame on his wall. The state of the bits -which can be seen with the naked eye- is still the same as it was in the 1970's. Oh, and it's actually quite aesthetically pleasing as well.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I think we finally have the answer to the age old question of "Where's the warez!"
They are right here, on this stack of 3.5" floppies.
Unless you can't spare fifteen dollars for a USB floppy drive?
I got your 3-1/2 inch floppy right here buddy.
A CopyIIPC option board can give you the raw data from the drive. This includes the sector headers, CRCs etc. All the stuff you normally don't see. The board would sit between the floppy drive and the standard floppy controller. The boards were ISA bus, so you will need an older computer to plug it into for it to work.
These are very likely not surface defects, just lost magnetization. There is not a lot you can to, besides reading these areas with forensic disk reader hardware. This requires reading the analog signal from the surface and then reconstructing the signal using digital signal processing. Depending on the floppy, you may need a sampling rate of up to 8MHz and should use 8 bit or larger resolution. A low-noise fast preamp may also be needed.
I do not know any source of these. Back in the day I did enough investigation to find out whether I could build one (I could have), but never followed through. I expect the only reasonable source today is to have one custom-built.
There may be commercial data-recovery outfits around that still have such a device. I remember a rate of 500 USD per floppy to be recovered.
Keep in mind that both approaches can fail with floppies this old.
Fortunately, I copied my floppies to MOD 12 years ago and today have them as images on redundant HDD storage.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I wonder how soon we will see the posts asking how to recover information from IDE drives - most modern motherboards lack this interface and in a few years IDE will be entirely abandoned (at least in the consumer oriented market).
This is a totally non-obvious trick that I came across this past year for mitigating binder failure
on floppies. Spray the surface with white board cleaner before you try to read them.
This should only be used as a last resort if you know that disks of a similar age and condition
shed rapidly, and obviously clean the heads before and after you try this.
"Magnetic media like tapes and floppies use a binder (glue) that becomes corrupted with moisture over time, allowing the metal-oxide particles to flake off."
This isn't actually the hydroscopic failure mode of 1/2" computer tapes. The tape becomes sticky and will glue itself to the head if the tape ever stops moving,
for example if the transport attempts to do a reread.
You need to bake computer tapes with a lot of airflow for the process to be effective. I have recovered thousands of tapes sucessfully this way.
perhaps this might help http://www.kryoflux.com/ ?
Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file were not recoverable in the end.
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29
And why do you need to retrieve it? Something that hasn't been touched in 20 years?
This approach also works with floppies. You have to know what you are doing though. I looked into this 20 years back. The S/N ratio on floppies is pretty high, so even a severely degraded signal may be recoverable this way.
Side note: User 460244 is talking gibberish and does not understand the problem. The magnetization areas in floppies are way above the flux areal size limits. You just read the analog signal from the heads.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's called parchive, and unfortunately it requires you to have included such data before it was damaged.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
if you cant get the data off using are a standard data dumper (eg dd) you are pretty much hosed.although sometimes diferent disk drives will have the heads aligned a little differently resulting in diffeent results. if dd cant read it your done.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
This DOS based utility had the ability to control every little detail of the floppy drive's mechanism, it managed to read "most" of a bad track leaving just one or few sectors out, saved many floppies with that thing back in the day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCopy
-. wherever you go, there you are
Given the maximum size of these zip files, you could replace the sectors and attempt to unzip for every possible value. Command line loops are wonderful things.
Really. The first step is always to try copying the disk (over and over) using multiple drives. Chances are, if the sector isn't completely unreadable, you'll get a good copy out of one of them.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Old servers often have excellent floppy drives with almost no use. If you can find someone giving away or parting out an old server, bag the drive.
In your case I would do what I used to do, which is use Winimage to image my floppy collection. It was a great way to keep a floppy image collection on CD, and you can create bootable floppy images to make floppy emulation bootable CDs.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I've recovered hundreds of floppies over the years. Here's what I've done to good effect.
(1) Find a machine with a floppy drive. If this machine hasn't had its floppy used in a while, either read/write a bunch of disks, or get it cleaned/aligned. I've opted for the former with good effect, but drives are getting old enough now that the former may be increasingly necessary. For older 5.25" drives, I'd definitely try to clean the heads, but be sure to do research so you don't grind the heads away by using the wrong methods. The reason I use the read/write method of a few disks that are new is that it gives you a chance to see if the drive is working on disks that don't matter. It might also allow you to have a minor cleaning effect from this to remove oxides from accumulated sitting time, but I'm unsure if that's what's going on. I have used different drives when the first tests failed, but never paid to have the broken drives fixed. There's just too many surplus floppy drives around. It might also help to have multiple drives.
(2) I have used both ddrecover and rescuedisk. The former is a gnu thing, the latter is included with FreeBSD. Both will incrementally read the disk and optionally write out data about what's been read. Both programs try to read as much data as possible in large blocks, then switch to smaller size reads for the damaged areas to try to get as much data off as quickly as possible with as few read-head passes. Having said that, often times there's a few stubborn sectors that just need to be tried a lot. For ddrecover, you may need to crank up the retry count to 1000 or more. rescuedisk does this automatically. I've had several disks that people have sworn are totally unreadable that I've been able to recover and placed in my hand to do something with. I've been able to recover most of them by retrying between 100 and 1000 times. When that fails, and it has in maybe 2 or 3 of the hundreds of disks I've done, I've taken the log files about what had been recovered to a different machine with a different drive and tried to read the (usually 1-4) missing sectors there. This hasn't failed me yet for disks that are hard to read merely because they are "old." My experience has been more concentrated on the 3.5" floppies than the older 5.25" floppies too. Different rules may apply there.
I guess I should caveat the above advice with "for disks that are just old". Disks that have been damaged over the years, or have had magnets run over them, etc all bets are off short of "extreme" options that might not even work.
Many of these techniques also work for reading damaged audio CDs, DVDs, etc.
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
"User 460244 is talking gibberish and does not understand the problem"
"The magnetization areas in floppies are way above the flux areal size limits."
"You just read the analog signal from the heads"
Inductive heads only detect flux transitions. Are you proposing the use of a MR transducer, which can directly measure flux?
Try to get you hands on a LS-120 drive. Either the IDE or the Parallel external version and get that working on some computer which still supports those.
The LS-120 is a 3.5 form factor drive that not only reads it's own 120meg disks but also standard 3.5 DDHD disks.
However I have found that this laser servo system and the read heads are much more sensitive and accurate then your normal mass produced run of the mill FD drive.
I have had many success getting data of off regular 3.5 disk with such a unit and not much read errors. I'd go for that.
I did something similar, found a Dell laptop floppy drive, still sealed in its original packaging, which also allowed you to use it as an external USB drive. I used a tool called Unstoppable Copier to copy what I could read of each disk's contents onto my hard disk. Wound up with a whopping 40 MB of data!
I hate to be the one shamelessly promoting my own software, but... I do have a program I wrote which may be able to help. It's a bit of a mess, but it's the only program I can find that will recover a truncated ZIP file - at least until the point when it runs out of data. It might help, if you're missing the directory record found at the end of the zip file. This program only needs the start.
http://birds-are-nice.me/programming/zipfilerecover.shtml
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/
Use an old LS 120 drive unit. These are much more accurate then regular drives. I have had a luck of luck with those.
Brute force of course! Just try all possible bit combinations until the checksum matches.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
ZIP is protected by 32-bit CRC. You can get a valid ZIP header, and change any 4 bytes (not at random, do it carefully), and get a valid CRC-32 result.
I actually wrote a program 10 years ago to re-create a file with a known header and CRC-32 and size. It did not work, but I let someone run it for a while just to see what happened. They got matches every 5 minutes I think on a 500mHz machine, and each file was 4 bytes difference.
32 bits = 4 bytes, every valid CRC32 value can be covered with 4 bytes. It's obvious when you think about it that way. What was interesting to me was the consistency. CRC32 did not seem to have any hot spots or congestion, the results were fairly uniform. I was pleasantly surprised.
On a 512 byte sector, you're going to have a minimum exponent of 128 to account for all of the variations.
He hooked his own analog-to-digital converter up to the read-head and post-processed the heck out of it to recover the data.
You may joke...but back in the day there were real video capture devices which digitized the whole frame of composite video then decoded it in software (to make them cheaper...)
No sig today...
I apologize if this was already mentioned, but one way of fixing is is by comparing track offsets. The idea is that you read the data at the edges of the track for the unreadable or corrupted bits.
If your data isn't critical it's probably not worth the effort/expense, but it is usually possible to recover.
check out the kryoflux
You will realize that you're better off recovering the respective floppies than the backups you considered so safe ... Maybe I got a bad bunch of DVDs but it took me one day and a lot of polish/wax and patience to recover the one that I needed at the time. For the rest, I might never finish recovering them. But maybe it's for the better, move house, cleanup, start fresh, who needs his DOS programs any more ? :)
] PR#6
I hear the guys are having great success speeding up this process with funroll-loops and -O51
*ducks*
goodbye karma...
PhotoRec is capable of carving .zip files, so I would use GNU DDRescue to create an image of the disk, and then photorec or testdisk to recover the file or the partition respectively. you can find all these utilities on this nice bootable livecd:
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/
Stop asking about media longevity and ask about file longevity. Then the answer becomes: store it on the media-of-the-day, whatever that is (today that's either hard disk or SSD, depending on taste/volume/speed_rquirements) on a networked computer. You don't think anymore in terms of reading from media, you think it terms of sending an NFS (or HTTP or whatever) request.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A) IS anything you have on disk already available on line? if so through it away.
B) Go to google.com and enter 'Repair bad sector floppy disk.
C) download tool.
I mean, seriously. were you in prison for the last 15 years?
Most important, be sure it's shit you need, otherwise your wasting your time getting data you haven't needed in years, to put it in a directory on the HD so you can continue to ignore it for years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anadisk, great low level floppy disk recovery. You need to know what you're doing, though.
Was it really necessary to suck Makerbot's creepy dick in that story? It's a stepper motor. They've been around since WWII. Can someone PLEASE explain to me this geek infatuation with an overpriced toy? I get the P.T. Barnum angle from that sociopathic scammer Pettis; what I don't get is the geek jizz flying all over the place. It's a bunch of stepper motors with a glue gun, "printing" out ludicrous baubles. For 1300$, it should be investigated and shut down by the SEC.
Nice one Timothy! I laughed harder than I probably should, because I totally have a rad collection of ASCII and ANSI art on diskette somewhere...
Make sure you transfer to analog tapes after that for best storage. Wire recordings are expensive.
Next task... breaking out that 20-year-old QIC-40 tape drive and pulling all of the good stuff off of it, from my BBS days...
Work flawlessly still, today 30 years later, doesn't even show surface wear at all. ... MCP.....Forbidden Forest
Davids Midnight magic...JumpMan Jr.
Good times!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Check this out (it's free, of course): http://mark0.net/soft-twin-e.html I made it 17 years ago, and it would be nice to know it's still useful to someone! :) It case of error, it retries some times to read the sector; if it keep trowing errors, it continue nonetheless, and create a disk image with all that was possible to read.
SeqBox
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!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"how to preserve digital data for long periods of time."
The one advantage of digital data is that is is easy to make idential copies.
Make lots of copies, with redundant encoding and error checking
Spread the copies in different physical locations.
Migrate it to a new medium as necessary (bit density increases over time)
Depending on ANY single copy surviving and being able to be read at some point
in the future makes no sense.
If you REALLY care about the data, you will spend the time to migrate it
to newer media.
You can simply make a 1 to 1 copy with dd rescue (both versions work) and repair the zip file with zip -F or zip -FF.
I got the same problem a while back was fun to play old dos games and looking at my old vb code^^
"Stop asking about media longevity and ask about file longevity."
"don't think anymore in terms of reading from media, you think it terms of sending an NFS (or HTTP or whatever) request."
EXACTLY!
Now, where can I buy a system to do this that isn't wrapped up in some proprietary software mechanism?
The only large-scale archival systems you can get today are sold by the likes of EMC for Sarbanes–Oxley compliance.
Did you actually verify bad sectors or did you just get CRC errors when extracting from multi-disk archives? The PKZIP disk spanning is buggy and often results in corruption, which won't be detected until you try to extract. This was true even back in those days. You could format a fresh batch of disks (without error), perform a zip span archive on them, and then immediately try to extract and they would already be corrupt. I would estimate that up to 20% of multi-disk archives were corrupted just by the software. I used this feature a lot -- at some point I owned several thousand floppies -- and only half of it was porn.
I may as well ask since this topic is basically spot-on and in the right crowd of folks. I have kept a single Amiga disk for about 18 years - the only disk I was unable to read as a disk image using the classic Disk2FDI software and the trick of using two floppies. It is corrupt somewhere on the disk, and because of this the entire disk cannot be recovered using Disk2FDI. My old Amiga 500 (now gone) also could not do anything with the disk.
I knew that all it would really take is something a bit more brute force. Any bit of data that was unrecoverable could later be intuitively filled-in. But the difficulty is that I would still be trying to read an Amiga-formatted disk on a PC.
Is there a good solution these days?
https://retracile.net/#a3.5Floppy-diskArchivingMachine
1. Get the best drive you can, make sure it's clean, and aligned.
2. Clean the disk itself as delicately as possible (see the web for suggestions)
3. Use a low-level imager (such as http://www.kryoflux.com) to read it at the flux transition level
4. Use their image tools to convert flux transitions to data for the sections that are still good
5. Use analysis techniques to reconstruct the data that's missing
And... :)
6. Hope...
You might be looking at a Windows bug. WinXP in particular had this stupid notion that it had to write volume tracking on floppies with EVERY read (unless write-protected, of course). This caused that floppy to become unreadable, behaving like a bad disk, on any other machine.
More info from a friend who researched the problem and generated a fix (after I applied this fix, my floppies magically stopped "dying")
=====
Volume Tracking is a method that Windows uses to ID a floppy disk. A unique hex number is written to the OEM-Name field in the bootsector, eight bytes starting at offset 03h. The system then uses this number to determine if the disk in the drive has changed. Write protect will stop it during a read but nothing will stop it during a write except some entries in the registry here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack
The key entries tell the system to compare certain bytes in the bootsector with the binary values in the key to determine whether or not to use Volume Tracking. If a match is found, Volume Tracking is NOT used.
Here is how the keys work. The first two numbers are a 16-bit offset into the bootsector with the high and low bytes reversed, keeping with Intel's method of storing 16-bit numbers. The remaining numbers are the values used for the compare.
Most bootsectors has a couple of things in common. First, the last two bytes are called the signature bytes and are usually 55h AAh. Second, the third byte at offset 02h is usually an NOP instruction, 90h. Almost all bootsectors have one or both of these things in common. The following two binary entries will cover these. The name given to the keys can be anything.
MS Sucks FE 01 55 AA
MS Suckz 02 00 90
During my research I found only 2 bootsectors that will not be covered by the above entries, PC-DOS 1.00 and DR Concurrent DOS 3.20. PC-DOS 1.00 has a date in the bootsector starting at offset 09h, 7-May-81. DR Concurrent DOS 3.20 has the value of 00h at offset 02h instead of 90h. The following two entries will cover these.
MS Blowz 09 00 37 2D 4D 61 79 2D 38 31
MS Blows 02 00 00
The included .reg files will insert the keys for you.
Just double-click or right-click and select "Merge".
You must restart for the entries to take effect.
NoVolTrack9x.reg - Windows 9x/ME
======
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack]
"MS Sucks"=hex:fe,01,55,aa
"MS Suckz"=hex:02,00,90
"MS Blows"=hex:02,00,00
"MS Blowz"=hex:09,00,37,2d,4d,61,79,2d,38,31
NoVolTrack2k.reg - Windows 2k/XP/2k3
=====
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack]
"MS Sucks"=hex:fe,01,55,aa
"MS Suckz"=hex:02,00,90
"MS Blows"=hex:02,00,00
"MS Blowz"=hex:09,00,37,2d,4d,61,79,2d,38,31
Windows 3.1/NT4 and earlier do not use Volume Tracking.
======
[I don't know if there's a similar bug in other OSs, but if they do an equivalent function I expect it produces similar results, ie. spurious 'dead' floppies.]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
No, it's not. I tested this rather extensively back in the Olden Days and found the "alignment" theory was a load of hooey.
What mattered is that the floppy had to be formatted so the OS could read it. Most FORMAT utilities wrote either a DOS3 or DOS5 boot sector. However, DOS5's boot sector was not backward-compatible, and an OS that expected DOS3 would report a DOS5-formatted floppy as NFG.
How'd I first notice this? At the time I had two fairly ancient systems, one ran DOS3.2, the other ran DOS 6.0 (which uses a DOS5.0 boot sector). The DOS6 system could ALWAYS read disks formatted on the DOS3 system, but the DOS3 system couldn't read ANY disks formatted on the DOS6 system... UNLESS they were formatted by XTreeGold, which produced a DOS3 boot sector. Then the very same disks, written in the very same drives, were perfectly readable on either machine.... *and* ANY other machine running DOS3.x or later.
And if I booted the DOS3 machine from a DOS6 boot disk, it could then magically read the very same floppies it had rejected when it booted from its normal DOS3.2.
I tried all sorts of cross-checks among different systems and several types of both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, including some whose owners complained of "alignment" issues, and found it was 100% consistent -- what mattered was not the drive or the disk, but how it was formatted (DOS3 or DOS5 boot sector) and what OS the machine was booted to.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think of VGAcopy: http://www.moenk.de/pages/vgacopy.html
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Tak a hair dryer to your floppy disk with the problem. Heat the disk up. You obviously don't want to get it so hot that the plastic deforms, but you want it over 100 degrees F. Keep it at that temp for a minute or so.
Pop the warm disk in the drive. There's a good chance it will read now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Really, those drive align perfectly on tracks and I was able to read old floppies first try with an LS120 drive.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Freezing works on floppies the same way it works on hard disks. But given that your drives are old, too. Use that as one of the last options.
Thanks, i saved it in case i need it.
I believe i used a program which could do this - it looked like it ignored bad files and extracted the rest. But i don't recall which program it was .. I found two or three free programs and lots of ones that cost money.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Yeah, cool.
Now go back 20 years with a copy of parchive for the fine submitter, please, so that this Ask Slashdot article can fade from its existence in the present.
Kid-proof tablet..
If you cared about the content, you would have transferred them to CD, DVD, BD, HDD, SSD and then got it on the cloud by now. There is a period of time when old generation is transitioned to new, so when floppies died that was your opportunity to transfer them to optical, now that optical is dying, get them on Google Docs.
But, finding a box of 20 year old diskettes and saying "Hey, I wonder what's on these" pretty much means you can throw them out without any remorse. You didn't care about them for 20 years, so why should you now? Sometimes people feel the need to have to recover old stuff, but the reality is its more hassle then its worth with little to gain from the process.
Even if floppy drives still existed, 20 year old disks with surface damage isn't something that is easy to recover, there is no magic tool short of Federal level of forensics that's going to recover pitted or oxidized media. All physical formats have a shelf life, again ignoring something for 20 years means you didn't care about the content enough to warrant any effort to recover it today.
Throw out them floppies and move on.
When I (used to) recover from old floppies I would turn to an old Thinkpad 750p laptop. It's floppy drive recovered many more discs successfully than the 5$ flimsy drives that equipped the last desktops that had floppies.
Successfully recovered the related bad sectors, thanks to ddrescue and a screwdriver
For whom could be concerned, i have used my best floppy drive (from an old 80286 i don't even remember the brand), ddrescue with -R 2000 and a screwdriver to "lowering" the diskette while ddrescue tries the remaining 3 bad sectors. I got a complete recover and a full CRC match of the archive.
Thanks everyone.