5 inch floppies

[Charles Curley]

On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:55:28AM -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to read some old (duh) 5 inch
> floppies with a borrowed drive on an FC3 box.
> Probabaly there is more than one format,
> but I'm not sure which has which.
> The usual result is that I can read the
> directory by clicking on a KDE icon,
> but get I/O errors when trying to read any of the files.
> Trying to mount with a mount command also results
> in an I/O error.
> If I couldn't read the directory,
> I'd suppose that I was out of luck.
> Is there a reason that the directory
> would be easier to read than the files?
> Any ideas on how to read the files?

If the floppies are double or single density, try reading them on a
double or single density drive. I recently tried recovering data from
some DSDD diskettes. After trying three DSHD drives, I got all of them
to work on a near-pristine DSDD drive.

Also, as has been mentioned, the BIOS must support the drive and you
must set it appropriately. Denisty is important; Linux will handle the
geometry. That may mean scrounging an old machine.

-- 

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