Read (repair) data from broken floppy disc on a linux system

How can i read an old floppy disk under Linux that has some problematic sectors? In times of DOS people used magic tools like Norton Disk Doctor and others.

Some of these tools read the broken part many times until they had success. Others used more intelligence. As far I remember some of these tools could repair nearly every broken file after some time.

I tried dd if=/dev/fd0 of=001.img but it stops with an error message dd_rescue continues the job, but the image is not readable afterwards.

How can I recover the files from a very old floppy with Linux tools?

Jonas Stein

Posted 2012-11-05T23:03:10.547

Reputation: 773

Answers

Summary for the other readers

Thanks to @ChrisF and @week it worked very well in the following order:

dd_rescue /dev/fd0 data.img
testdisk data.img

I could restore even deleted files. Screenshots can be found here cgsecurity.org Finally i found another tool called (gnu)ddrescue and a discussion about the differences.

Jonas Stein

Posted 2012-11-05T23:03:10.547

Reputation: 773

testdisk should help with this. It's an opensource multiplatform data recovery software.

week

Posted 2012-11-05T23:03:10.547

Reputation: 3 128

1Can you add some explanation as to why this will help. – ChrisF – 2012-11-07T23:39:11.143

testdisk has a nice menu and looks promising, but it was not very intelligent in reading. testdisk and dd_rescue should create an image. The size of both images was the same. testdisk was faster, but inserted 00 for 30% of the image, while dd_rescue wrote some data. – Jonas Stein – 2012-11-07T23:45:00.210

Add image created by dd_rescue as parameter to testdisk. – week – 2012-11-07T23:55:44.090

@week i guess that will be the best combination of both tools. I will try that. It is a pitty, that testdisk does not use the dd_rescue per option. – Jonas Stein – 2012-11-08T00:31:29.680

@JonasStein Wish you luck.. – week – 2012-11-08T00:40:32.003

testdisk is for recovering damaged hard disk partition tables or reformatted filesystems. It isn't going to help recover files on a damaged floppy. – psusi – 2012-11-08T03:23:53.850