[wplug] Floppy disk copy programs

Chris Ott cott at acclamation.com
Wed Mar 9 10:44:36 EST 2005


I notice a lot of people are responding with "dd", and this will work 
for any format that Linux understands.

However, your message implies you might not always have standard 
IBM-formatted floppies to work with, so I'll just mention:

	http://www.jschoenfeld.com/indexe.htm

Go down to the bottom left and check out the "Catweasel MK3". It's a 
special floppy controller that will read and write any format. Right 
now, they have programs that will read TRS-80, Apple II, and Amiga disks 
and, if you search the Internet, you can probably find others.

If you have a completely different format and you know how to program, 
you can write your own decoder, but you need to understand the format. I 
did (for old "Ohio Scientific" machines) and it's not hard; it took me a 
few days to get a mostly-working program.

Now if I could just find an 8" floppy drive... :-)

Chris

Tom Fetherston wrote:
> I fine myself working on a lot of old medical equipment that come with 
> system and service software on floppy disk.  They are usually really odd 
> format schemes that aren't readable/copyable in any regular fashion.  
> These are often on 3.5's but those had a lot of densities formatting 
> schemes even in the dos world, let alone what some of these machines are 
> running.
> 
> Anyone have some suggests on programs to address this from the linux world?
> 
> Tom
> 
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