Good morning all. I have myself a slight dilemma. I have in excess of 500 floppy disks containing an archive of what are called surface files (Wayne could probably inform those curious a lot better than myself). Said floppy disks were created using a piece of software called WinTar to a SCSI floppy drive (it seems). And of course is on it's own unreadable. Has anyone else had any luck accessing WinTar'd media via linux? I'm all googled out!
Cheers Richard
As far as I can tell WinTAR writes standard tar archives..the key thing being of course that it looks like they are written as such straight onto the floppy as if it were a raw block device rather than being written to a file on the floppy filesystem.
I am guessing here but I would have expected that dd'ing the floppy into a file and then using tar to extract from that would work.
so dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy1.tar
substitute the device node for whatever the floppy device is on your system...you don't mention if you are using the original SCSI floppy drive or not.
Set the write protect tab on the floppies so that no silly mistakes can be made..naturally
What did you do so wrong that your punishment is to extract data from 500 floppies...must have been pretty bad :-)
On 07-Jun-07 08:29:33, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
As far as I can tell WinTAR writes standard tar archives..the key thing being of course that it looks like they are written as such straight onto the floppy as if it were a raw block device rather than being written to a file on the floppy filesystem.
I am guessing here but I would have expected that dd'ing the floppy into a file and then using tar to extract from that would work.
so dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy1.tar
substitute the device node for whatever the floppy device is on your system...you don't mention if you are using the original SCSI floppy drive or not.
Set the write protect tab on the floppies so that no silly mistakes can be made..naturally
The above looks plausible to me ... the only thing I'd add is that a lot of these old archive-to-floppy programs supported multi-volume archives -- i.e. the archive can be split across several floppies, so you could do as Wayne suggests, concatenating the outputs for conxecutive floppies, but you'd have to ensure: a) That you have the floppies in the right order b) That you take account of any "sellotape" in the archives which is there to support transition from one floppy ("volume") to the next.
'info tar' leads me to the "-M" option:
--multi-volume -M Informs `tar' that it should create or otherwise operate on a multi-volume `tar' archive.
along with which it may be useful to consider:
--new-volume-script (see -info-script)
--info-script=SCRIPT-FILE --new-volume-script=SCRIPT-FILE -F SCRIPT-FILE When `tar' is performing multi-tape backups, SCRIPT-FILE is run at the end of each tape. If SCRIPT-FILE exits with nonzero status, `tar' fails immediately.
("tape" includes "floppy" here, of course).
The other thing to watch out for is that backup (at least) archives may have different files with identical names in different archives, so watch out that you don't zap one file when extracting another! One directory per archive is a good idea at this stage.
What did you do so wrong that your punishment is to extract data from 500 floppies...must have been pretty bad :-)
Lived too long ago, I should think.
Those who made history are condemned to dismantle it later ...
I remember from a mere 10-12 years ago using 250MB tape cartridges (on Linux with 'mtst') in precisely this way. I later moved on to Iomega "mega-floppies" ... 100MB on a floppy, COR!!!
Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 07-Jun-07 Time: 10:07:18 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Of course I didn't consider the fact that the archive may be split across several disks..or indeed all of them, there probably are ways of coping with that but you would need to know which disks form a set (or if it is one big set made at the same time..which would be very bad)
Of course you could also try some symlinking of device nodes so that your floppy drive appears on a tape device node and see if tar will read them direct...but if this is the only copy of this data then I would be tempted to dd each floppy to a file first anyway because then you can replace any that fail due to disk errors during later attempts.
Regards Wayne
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Richard Bensley -
ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood