Comments on: All I Really Need To Know I Learned From 360K Floppies

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 02:42:16 +0000

Somewhat off topic, but I later learned how to fix the old zdos disk images so linux can read them. In case someone with the same problem googles to here:

There is some information in the bootsector that tells what particular flavor of FAT this is, and I guess at that time there was only one flavor so it wasn’t needed.

cp broken.ima good.ima
dd bs=1 if=bsrec8z.dat \
of=good.ima seek=3 conv=notrunc
mount -oloop good.ima /mnt/d1

where bsrec8z.dat is 59 bytes starting with #4 from a good disk of that format:
00000000 5A 44 4F 53 20 20 20 20 00 02 02 01 00 02 70 00 ZDOS ……p.
00000010 80 02 FF 01 00 08 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 …………….
00000020 00 00 00 29 00 00 00 00 56 4F 4C 55 4D 45 4C 41 …)….VOLUMELA
00000030 42 45 4C 46 41 54 31 32 20 20 20 BELFAT12

for 9-sect disks that came later, this would be:
00000000 5A 44 53 20 20 32 2E 30 00 02 02 01 00 02 70 00 ZDS 2.0……p.
00000010 D0 02 FD 02 00 09 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 …………….
00000020 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 …………….
00000030 00 00 DF 02 25 02 08 2A FF 50 F6 ….%..*.P.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 16:02:08 +0000

I would have used Virtual PC to run a Windows 3.1 environment, and then run WordPerfect 5.0 or 5.1. WP 5 is around on the net for download – I have several old versions of it.

By: Ed

Ed — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:33:35 +0000

You can probably read the the disks with extra sectors
under linux, using fdutils information and utilities:
http://fdutils.linux.lu/Fdutils.html
I had the opposite problem- a bunch of old 320k floppies
with 8 sectors instead of 9 from dos 1.x? and Zenith ZDOS.

Even without installing the fdutils, the standard distribution
“setfdprm” (man setfdprm) allowed me to read the disks:
Add to /etc/fdprm
# size sec/t hds trk stre gap rate spec1 fmt_gap
320/1200 640 8 2 40 1 0×23 0×01 0xDF 0×50

and enter “setfdprm -p /dev/fd1 320/1200″ !(my 5.25 drive is B:, fd1)
This modifies fd1 so it won’t read normal 360k floppies until you reboot- use fd1h360
Or there are instructions for making a new device for the 320k floppies.
So I dd’d all my disks to images.
Now if I could teach linux to mount the ZDOS disks/images!
DOS6.22 uses them, maybe dosemu running dos6.22 will mount the images.

By: jgoerzen

jgoerzen — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:41:28 +0000

Ahh. Even with footnotes, font changes, embedded graphics, etc? (From looking at the features page, it doesn’t look like those WP5 features are supported)

Thanks for your comments.

By: Hub

Hub — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:05:39 +0000

We support that too.

By: jgoerzen

jgoerzen — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:57:46 +0000

I’ve looked at WPD. Unfortunately, my files are mostly WordPerfect 5.0 and 5.1, with a few even back to 4.2. I probably have a few WPD files, but not many.

Thanks anyway ;-)

By: Hub

Hub — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:20:57 +0000

The wonderful AbiWord with libwpd do support WordPerfect 6.0 files.

It is all Free Software :-)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:16:19 +0000

That depends on what storage db mysql uses. If it is configured to use berkeley db then you can read it with berkeley db tools.

By: jgoerzen

jgoerzen — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 19:52:16 +0000

Yeah, I can always run mysqldump to get it into an ASCII format.

My note was because MySQL (like any other SQL database) has a binary on-disk format that you can’t read without, well, MySQL.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 19:06:58 +0000

I wouldn’t be concerned about the blog. SQL is as good as standards get.

By: gary ng

gary ng — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 14:31:33 +0000

This proves that even if the media used is safe(doesn’t mean floppy), the content still needs periodic re-archive, your wordperfect/1-2-3 example.

The problem with CD-R/DVD-R is that they still will tend to be forgotten(we thought it is safe) and usually in multiple volumes, we don’t want to touch them for re-archive(shuffling multiple CD/DVD is time consumption and no fun).

I have encountered this problem a few years ago and adopted a HD only backup policy. I just do a re-archive when I changed HD/Computer and with the right scripts, the file content would be brought to the then “updated” format. And because it is usually one HD, I can just let the machine do the job without my attention.