5 inch floppies

[Michael Hennebry]

On Sat, 3 Sep 2005, George N. White III wrote:

> On Sat, 3 Sep 2005, Michael Hennebry wrote:
>
> >
> > I'm trying to read some old (duh) 5 inch
> > floppies with a borrowed drive on an FC3 box.
> > Probabaly there is more than one format,
> > but I'm not sure which has which.
> > The usual result is that I can read the
> > directory by clicking on a KDE icon,
> > but get I/O errors when trying to read any of the files.
> > Trying to mount with a mount command also results
> > in an I/O error.
> > If I couldn't read the directory,
> > I'd suppose that I was out of luck.
> > Is there a reason that the directory
> > would be easier to read than the files?
> > Any ideas on how to read the files?
>
> I've seen this behaviour with old floppies -- I suspect there is a bad or
> marginal area on the disk.  Since the data typically take much more space

Disks. Plural.

> than the directory, the chances of a bad spot zapping data are much
> higher.  You should try a different drive -- old drives are even less
> reliable than old floppies.

I only have one drive.
Apparently I'm getting all the directory data,
but none of the other data at all.

-- 
Mike   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"There are three kinds of people,
those who can count and those who can't."