[wplug] floppy disk rescue

[Jonathan Billings]

On Nov 27, 2006, at 5:01 PM, Arnaud Loos wrote:

> I have a floppy with a word document on it which I'm unable to read in
> windows. Running it through a windows file recovery program tells  
> me that
> there are many bad blocks on the disk, but I can't get any usable  
> data from
> it. In linux I'm able to read a directory listing from the disk,  
> but a file
> copy results in an input/output error about half way through.
>
> I'm looking for a way to recover the document but am unsure how to  
> proceed.
> I suppose creating a disk image is an option but I don't know how  
> dd will
> deal with the bad blocks and/or corrupted data. Are there any special
> switches I should use? Can anyone recommend another program or  
> method which
> may have more success at reading the disk?

Probably you'll want to skip errors, so use:
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img bs=1k conv=noerror,sync

(conv=noerror,sync just keeps it running after it hits an error, and  
sync pads the unreadable blocks to the blocksize supplied)

Then, you can try mounting the image on the loopback, and copying off  
the file.  There is a fsck for FAT filesystems, I believe, which  
might be useful.  I'd suggest you run it on a copy of the image, in  
case it ruins the image, so you don't have to re-dd the image.

--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>