Conversation

Notices

1. Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:42 UTC Andrew (Television Executive)

   Hey Fediverse! I need your help.

   I met a very sweet old man named Tom. He used to work for IBM. He's probably 75 years old or so.

   He has a floppy disk that allegedly contains documents his father wrote.

   He wants me to try to copy it.

   My floppy drive isn't reading it.

   I want some suggestions on next steps on how to proceed. I recognize that the disk is probably shot, but I really want to give it the old college try.

   • Tagomago (tagomago@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:33 UTC Tagomago

     in reply to

     • Josh Mulliken

     @josh @ajroach42 Also cat.

   • Josh Mulliken (josh@mast.mulliken.net)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:39 UTC Josh Mulliken

     in reply to

     @ajroach42 Gotcha. I was going to recommend `dd` to a file and then `scalpel` to see if you can find any files

   • Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:40 UTC Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     • Josh Mulliken

     @josh I only tried it in two machines.

     The first is probably having issues with it's floppy drive that are more general than this guys disk. I remembered that after we tried it and it didn't respond.

     The second was a USB floppy drive on Ubuntu. The drive was recognized, the disk was not, but this might be USB FDD weirdness, so I don't want to rule out the disk yet.

     I'm going to try some other disks in that drive today and see what that gets me.

   • Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:41 UTC Andrew (Television Executive)

     in reply to

     • Josh Mulliken

     @josh FAT12, DOS or Win31 word docs or RTFs.

   • Josh Mulliken (josh@mast.mulliken.net)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:41 UTC Josh Mulliken

     in reply to

     @ajroach42 So the drive is not detecting it as a disk? Or is it detecting it as a disk but not mounting it?

   • Josh Mulliken (josh@mast.mulliken.net)'s status on Monday, 07-Mar-2022 19:23:42 UTC Josh Mulliken

     in reply to

     @ajroach42 Do you know what format it is supposed to be?