[NBLUG/talk] floppy recovery

[Kyle Rankin]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 01:12:15PM -0700, E Frank Ball III wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:13:10PM -0700, Sean wrote:
>  > I have a floppy disk whose FAT partition has become damaged. It is a
>  > new disk, so I'd like to think the data is there and just not
>  > readable.
>  > 
>  > I'd prefer to recover the data off of the floppy (it's not critical,
>  > but will save time), but I can't get fdisk to read it and my KDE
>  > desktop can't open it. I am not able to mount the floppy, and after
>  > trying for awhile the system gives me an error stating that I need to
>  > specify the partition type.
>  > 
>  > Does anyone know of a process or program that I can use to recover the data?
> 
> 
> Try using "dd" to create an image of the disk, then mount that with the
> loopback or make a new floppy from it.  The man page for dd talks about
> a "noerror" flag that might be useful.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
>    E Frank Ball                frankb at frankb.us
> 

Be careful with the noerror flag. While it means that dd won't exit when it
encounters a block it can't read, it does mean that dd will simply skip the
block entirely, so depending on the number of damaged blocks you could get
a floppy image that is substantially smaller. Another program to consider
would be dd_rescue, which writes zeros for blocks when it encounters
errors.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org