My father left me a batch of 3.5 inch "floppy" disks created with Windows 95 (Dutch). I want to copy their contents. My only computer with a floppy drive runs Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS.
After installing the udisks package,
udisks --mount /dev/fd0 mounts the contents on /media/floppy0.
This is fine for files with standard (8.3) DOS filenames, but it goes horribly wrong when anything else is present:
ls -l /media/floppy0 /bin/ls: cannot access /media/floppy0/vï▐ffφl.: Input/output error /bin/ls: cannot access /media/floppy0/$Θh²çⁿ.tΘ: Input/output error /bin/ls: cannot access /media/floppy0/ëG╟+.|√═: Input/output error /bin/ls: cannot access /media/floppy0/t╛n}φa.2σ═: Input/output error total 13395579 -r-xr-xr-x 1 rp root 1476370920 Dec 25 1959 ╣?.??? -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 641204006 Jan 30 1980 └≤½Θ- ps.QR3 -r-xr-xr-x 1 rp root 1346403387 Dec 19 1905 6?|■└ó<|.í7| -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 48514 Jan 1 1980 BL.WDB -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 3728 Aug 25 2000 CADRE.WP -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 2857697280 Dec 31 1979 COM d????????? ? ? ? ? ? ??ëG?╟?+.|√═ -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 2294480508 Dec 11 1966 ï?=|Ω -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 152428 Dec 23 1991 KAART2.WKS -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 12909 Jan 1 1980 KABRO.WKS -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 8554 Nov 28 1991 K.BRO drwxr-xr-x 2 rp root 1024 Nov 28 1991 KOPIE -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 47250 Nov 28 1991 L39.ZND -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 0 Dec 19 1991 LIJST39.WEK d????????? ? ? ? ? ? t?╛n}φa.2σ═ -r-xr-xr-x 1 rp root 1963196670 Jan 6 2038 ├┬?.ⁿ?u d????????? ? ? ? ? ? vï▐ffφl?.??? -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 21774 Dec 31 1979 WIELEK.WDB -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 22612 Dec 31 1979 WIELGA.WDB -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 23255 Dec 22 1991 WIEL.WBL -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 27044 Jan 1 1980 WIEL.WDB -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 0 Jan 8 1980 δ4ÉIBM.3.2 d????????? ? ? ? ? ? $?Θh²çⁿ?.t?Θ -rwxr-xr-x 1 rp root 3137341625 Nov 26 1907 Θ╨■φ? s?.├╛? (It's not just the nonsensical filenames: rsyncing the contents of this floppy gave me a 5GB file, at which point I ran out of disk space.)
My guess: VFAT pathname translation is attempted incorrectly or not at all.
How to rectify this?
Pages I found with Google, such as this one, suggest it's a matter of supplying appropriate values for the iocharset and codepage mount options.
Is this true? Which values to use? And, first of all: how to supply them?
udisks silently ignores any mount options supplied:
$ udisks --mount /dev/fd0 --mount-options='ro,iocharset=utf8,codepage=1252,foo=bar' Mounted /org/freedesktop/UDisks/devices/fd0 at /media/floppy0 $ fgrep fd0 /proc/mounts /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 vfat ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 0 (That's not what I said!)
A direct mount silently fails:
$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only $ fgrep fd0 /proc/mounts (returns nothing; the mount just doesn't work).
At least this way I can check which codepages are valid:
$ sudo mount -t vfat -oro,codepage=850 /dev/fd0 /mnt $ fgrep fd0 /proc/mounts $ sudo mount -t vfat -oro,codepage=85 /dev/fd0 /mnt mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or s but what I need is a way to actually mount with such a codepage.
What is wrong? What else can I try?
113 Answers
Long storage may have affected these floppies and their FAT could be broken. This is highly possible, because even freshly written floppy could not be considered a reliable media. I often made 2 copies of the same data when used floppies many years ago.
There's a good wiki explaining the usage of codepage and iocharset options of the mount command for FAT file system.
Direct support of floppies in newer systems isn't reliable. Even in 12.04 their support was plagued with multiple bugs. One of them, for example.
The mount command argument -t specifies the file system type. You are close in your usage however you need a space between the -t and the file system type. Change your command from:
$ sudo mount -tvfat /dev/fd0 /mnt to:
$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt Sorry I don't have access to my machines with floopy drives to show what the real life output looks like.
2If you add up the file sizes of each file in your example that have legit filenames and creation dates, the total is 328,058. This is about the results one might expect to find on a floppy of that capacity (1MB).
Clearly, you aren't going to find a 5 GB file or a file created in 1959 or 2038 in a nearly 30 year old storage device.
If your issue is to recover legitimate files from these old floppies, that seems possible now by just copying the files with reasonable names, file sizes and dates.
I have no hardware to test anything this old and you can only assume that udisks supports these ancient drives. I'm guessing perhaps not. Or at least not flawlessly.
There may be a method to cobble a mount scheme that will properly read the file structure on these devices but that seems like a lot of work if all you want to do is recover the files.
sudo mount /dev/fd0 /floppy -t vfat "ought" to work....
Win95 was a way long time ago and I don't think NTFS was around then. But of course one [albeit remote] possibility is that the floppy is not formatted as a FAT device.
Then there's always the compatibility issue of the native IDE controller versus a USB interface and whether the latter (which I assume you are using) faithfully communicates with the drive hardware and media.
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