I have received some research that is on 5. 25" floppies. My mobo supports 5. 25" disks, and, I have the disk drive. I am not trying to use this media long term, I just want the research data.
Update:
I just found out the file-system is some proprietary system put out by Varian. I have a machine that might be able to read the data... Or that machine might not work. If anyone knows about archaic Varian OSes / File-systems, I would be happy to hear about it.
Image mounting is current priority, I have been able to get disk images using ddrescue, and or safecopy. Both softwares show that there is block errors on some disks. I am still unable to mount the images the disks produce, mount persistently asks for file-system type. Fat, vfat, exfat, fat16 and some others I tried, but they fail, saying something like incorrect FS type. Yes, I have also tried combinations of -o loop.
I have been unable to determine FS type by looking at the hexdump -C output from the image files.
Also, I thried to determine FS type this way:
#dd if=lisa1.iso | file -
/dev/stdin: data
I still do not know how to get to where I can mount / see files.
I just read that 18k is the standard block-size of a single track, so this is the "native" amount of bits the floppy read heads want to read anyway. It should be fastest and have the best chance of getting all the resalable bits.
I will re-image the disks tomorrow.
My boss says he doesn't know what the File-system type is, or what it might have been. , I may able to locate the instrument which generated the data. This will require time to dig in the graveyard of old science equipment.
I have installed testdisk to try and do data recovery.
I can remember having to do something like this in 2008, but I can't recall now, how I used to recover floppy disk data.
When I run udisk, or mount I get an error saying the floppy is not a valid block device.
$ sudo mount /dev/fd0 Desktop/lisa/
mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device
$ sudo udisks --mount /dev/fd0
Mount failed: Error mounting: mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device
UPDATE1:
- Floppy Drive port options are on. I have them set to 5. 25" double
density
- The disk drive models are: Epson SD-700 and Epson SD-600
- The Disks are Verbatum DataLife MD 2D "Double Density"
- I have added the module for floppy disks.
UPDATE2:
$ sudo udisks --mount /dev/fd0
Mount failed: Error mounting: mount: you must specify the filesystem type
Mount gives the same error, but... I Don't know the File System type.
$getfdprm
DS QD sect=13
I ran this program from fdutils. http://www.fdutils.linux.lu/Fdutils.html DS means double sided QD means Quad Density sect=13 is a sector count. I don't really know what the output means, in terms of how to mount the disks and get the data.
What should I do to find the filesystem type?
UPDATE3: As a sanity check, I found a "new" box of blank, formatted floppies, I was able to read and write data, without specifying a File system type.
Assuming the Floppies I have with research on them are formatted, and have errors, might that prevent them from being mounted?
Heres what ddrescue is doing:
$ sudo ddrescue /dev/fd0 ~/Desktop/fd0.iso
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 454656 B, errsize: 1019 kB, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 538624 B, errors: 11, average rate: 69 B/s
opos: 538624 B, time from last successful read: 40 s