reading ancient floppy formats

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I want to rescue the contents of some old floppy disks.  They are 5.25
inch quad-density with a 7th edition UNIX filesystem on them.

The normal way to select the appropriate floppy drive configuration is
to select the right device node.  The closest is /dev/fdnh720, but that
isn't quite right (I need 10 sectors per track).  So I think that I
need the setfdprm command.

Unfortunately, the setfdprm command was dropped from Fedora around
Fedora Core 6.  Here's the changelog entry from util-linux

* Tue Aug 16 2005 Karel Zak <kzak at redhat.com> 2.13-0.2.pre2
...
- removed: elvtune, rescuept and setfdprm

Does anyone know why this command was removed?  Perhaps the device
driver no longer had the necessary functionality.

Is there a newer better way to read my disks?

Gene: this might be a question for you.  I see you posted something to
the kernel list about setfdprm a couple of years ago.
  http://groups.google.ca/group/linux.kernel/msg/d7d3259d9a8fca2e?hl=en