[Web4lib] floppy disk issues

[Erik Hetzner]

(Resending, as my pgp signature seems to have caused this message to be silently dropped.)

At Tue, 8 May 2007 09:10:22 -0400,
"Stevens, Julieanne H." <jhsteven at law.stetson.edu> wrote:
> I've had some luck, the last time being over a year ago, though, with
> referring people to Kinko's. They've reclaimed several papers that we
> were sure were lost to the world.

When I worked, years ago, in a campus computer lab, we saw this *all*
the time. This was before the age of cheap flash drives. With the
really unreadable disks my best solution was to use the dd program on
linux (or bsd). It looks like rawrite for Windows provides similar
capabilities (tho’ you must remember to READ, not write the disk).
Basically, you dump an image of the raw data on the disk into a file
on the hard drive. The resulting image can then be opened as text in a
word processor (or emacs, etc.) You get a lot of junk, and your files
are all mixed together, but among that junk is usually text that can
be reassembled into something close to what their original was like in
less time than rewriting.

Hopefully students these days are less likely to keep the only copy of
their dissertation on single floppy they carry everywhere.

best,
Erik Hetzner