tashirosgt
14th September 2004, 01:36 AM
First, let me say that I know there is software to recover data from floppies that have gone bad (at least there is for windows).
Second,I also acknowledge that the best way to do this is not to read the floppy with an ordinary floppy drive where the head rubs over the surface of the magnetic material. There are labs that can scan the material with a no-contact sensor.
Third, I don't have any valuable data on a floppy gone bad.
Having said that, what would be a interesting do-it-yourself way to go about recovering data from bad floppy? In the spirit of fooling around with computers (rather than accomplishing a task) I've been wondering if I could just do a
dd noerror if=/dev/floppy0 of=myfile.dat
(perhaps several times, if a bit here and there is being reported ambiguously). Then I could use od to examine the files. To make sense of them I would need to know the byte-by-byte format of the floppy's file allocation table. Where could I find this format documented? And how much progress do you think I could make with this technique?
Second,I also acknowledge that the best way to do this is not to read the floppy with an ordinary floppy drive where the head rubs over the surface of the magnetic material. There are labs that can scan the material with a no-contact sensor.
Third, I don't have any valuable data on a floppy gone bad.
Having said that, what would be a interesting do-it-yourself way to go about recovering data from bad floppy? In the spirit of fooling around with computers (rather than accomplishing a task) I've been wondering if I could just do a
dd noerror if=/dev/floppy0 of=myfile.dat
(perhaps several times, if a bit here and there is being reported ambiguously). Then I could use od to examine the files. To make sense of them I would need to know the byte-by-byte format of the floppy's file allocation table. Where could I find this format documented? And how much progress do you think I could make with this technique?
