Floppy disk archive archive#
Floppy disk archive software#

It doesn't appear as an actual floppy device Provides read-only access to a 5.25″ floppy drive. (with source code!) and does what it says:

Floppy disk archive software#

It comes with a ribbon cable, USB cable, and imaging software USB floppy controller, and was happy with it.

I considered many options and eventually got a Once you have a drive, you need to find a way to connect it.īut contemporary PCs don't even have a floppy disk controller

Mitsumi/Newtronics D509V3 Jumpers by anarchivist.

Floppy drive jumper settings – I found this post useful because I never would have guessed that some of the jumper labels were covered up.

Plate, but I eventually had to take that off anyway I wasn't sure of the correct jumper settings,īut it turns out the ones it shipped with worked.Īccess to the jumpers was impeded by the top metal That turned out to be unnecessary because the It arrived after five days (ordered on a Saturday, arrived on a Thursday via USPS Priority Mail). I found a drive, a Newtronics/Mitsumi DV509V3, at I got better results when I started searching for specificĭrive model numbers like 'DV509V3' rather than generic terms. I hit a bunch of local stores and a computer recycling center no dice.Īnd the online results for 'floppy drive' seemed expensive, $150+. You can't just buy an all-in-one USB-connected drive.Įven sourcing an old drive with a standard floppy controller is difficult. I think I had to do this for one stubborn disk:įdrawcmd read $(($head*4)) $cyl $head $sec 2 0 0x1b 0xff length=512 rate=0 need_seek track=$cyl > img I have a note with this command written down īut it seems to be reading one sector at a time The command setfdprm /dev/fd0 sect=9 dd ssize=512 cyl=80 That trying to read them leads to a lot of errors-this was the caseįor at least one weird 1.0 MB disk I found. Some disks may have different low-level formatting, such Most of the disks had the standard 1.44 MB formatting and just worked. process-floppy.sh DISKNAME to start the process

Here are the scripts, some tweaking may be necessary:

Floppy disk archive archive#

(I had to do this when I found some additional disks later.)įor each disk, I wanted a sector-level raw image, plus an archive fileĪnd a graphical scan of the front and back of the disk. You can easily buy a USB-connected floppy drive for less than $20. If you don't have a PC with a floppy drive, It happened that my folks still had an old PC with a 3.5″ disk drive.Īnd wrote some scripts to help automate the process. I managed to archive over 85% of the 3.5″ disks and over 90%Īnd most of the remainder were at least partially readable, I decided to try and read the data off them before the old Notes about recovering data from 30-year-old 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppy disks.Īt my parents' place I found a stash of a couple hundredįloppy disks, some dating back to my early childhood. Floppy disk recovery Floppy disk recovery