Talk:Rescuing Floppy Disks

HOW'S ABOUT ZIP DISKS?

Yeah, that's right. I went there.

But no Jaz disks. I wasn't ever that hardcore.

--Qwerty0 06:49, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

For Zip and Jaz disks and such, you're best off using a good drive and ddrescue. Be sure to block mounting though. Balrog 01:49, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

So, not quite sure how to put this into the main page, but I do want it here for discussion. Here's the commands I used to dump files from & image my 3.5 MS-DOS & Windows floppies.

(All commands were done on a computer with a regular 3.5 floppy drive hooked up thru IDE, not a USB drive).

If you'd just like to view the files, and do basic operations on a disk, try mtools. [1] Page is old, but tells you what you need to know about mtools.

Floppy copying: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=AOL25-test.img conv=notrunc #Most basic, stops when it hits an error.

ddrescue -d -n -b512 /dev/fd0 Lemmings.img Lemmings1 #If you think your disk has issues, this quickly tries to copy the disk, leaving notes in the log file where the gaps are.

More intensive rescue: ddrescue -d -n -b512 /dev/fd0 Odell-Down-Under-disk2-copy.img Odell2 #If you used DD first, and it had an error, run this- otherwise, move to step 2.

ddrescue -d -b512 /dev/fd0 Odell-Down-Under-disk2-copy.img Odell2 #This allows ddrescue to split damaged areas, hopefully recovering some or all of the gaps.

ddrescue -d --retrim -b512 /dev/fd0 Sea-Rogue-disk3.img Sea-Rogue3 #Force it to try everything again.

ddrescue -d --retrim -r 3 -b512 /dev/fd0 Sea-Rogue-disk3.img Sea-Rogue3 #Try everything again, this time in reverse, with 3 tries for each error.

Dashcloud1 19:41, 18 July 2012 (EDT)

These instructions will also work quite well for 5.25" disks. Note that due to the nature of the medium, successive reads from a damaged area may exacerbate the damage.

InitHello 21:18, 28 March 2013 (EDT)