{"id":2489,"date":"2025-09-15T20:11:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T00:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=2489"},"modified":"2025-09-15T20:11:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T00:11:05","slug":"archiving-floppies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2025\/archiving-floppies\/","title":{"rendered":"Archiving Floppies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’m slowly getting to clearing out some of the old office stuff at home, and yes, I appear to still have some 3.5″ floppies. I did in fact have a 3.5″ floppy drive, but it was in an old husk of a former PC. My desktop machine has a modern power supply and didn’t even have the right power connector to hook up the drive (easy fix with an adapter) – at least the motherboard still had the right connector to hook up the data cable.<\/p>\n

I then had to do the right BIOS dance to actually enable the device, once this was done I could see it under Linux as \/dev\/fd0<\/code>. Unfortunately the handful of disks I tried to mount gave errors, it seemed either this drive is faulty or all of my disks are expired. Now, these are floppies from the early 90’s – which is oh my 35 years ago!<\/p>\n

Time to bust out ddrescue<\/code><\/a>, and see if I can image any of these disks to pull data. Sadly my initial attempts were not great – I wasn’t getting much data off of these at all. Maybe this is a huge waste of time. I found the useful seeming ddrescueview<\/code><\/a> which gives me a way to look at the status of the rescue attempt.<\/p>\n

Let’s cover the basics. My initial attempts looked like<\/p>\n

ddrescue \/dev\/fd0 floppy.fd floppy.map<\/pre>\n
This worked, but I got a lot of errors. Adding the -d<\/code> flag seemed to help a lot, but later I found out that I needed more flags to make this right.<\/p>\n
ddrescue -d \/dev\/fd0 floppy1.fd floppy1.map<\/pre>\n
I found a useful wikipage entry from the archiveteam<\/a> specific to recovering floppies.<\/p>\n
Here is the ddrescueview visualization of my initial attempt:<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a>So not great. Next up is when I added the -d<\/code> flag<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a>Better. Of course as I decided to make sure this was repeatable, I tried removing the -d<\/code> flag and running it again to make sure it was really bad. This time I got a completely clean read (fully green). There were 2 errors reported, but it retried and it was good?<\/p>\n
So I start trying various combinations to see if I’m getting repeatable results. Overall it’s random errors and no clean reads again.<\/p>\n
Now the clever thing that ddrescue<\/code> does, is maintain a map file. This captures what was done, and allows you to run another pass to try to have more luck. This is what I need. Referencing the archiveteam advice I landed on this as the right combination<\/p>\n
ddrescue -d -b512 -r 3 --retrim \/dev\/fd0 floppy3.fd floppy3.map<\/pre>\n
Let’s break down the flags<\/p>\n