Hey /vr/, I didn't know where to post this so I figured I'd just post it here.I have come into ownership of some old floppy disks. Some of them are just random shit, but two caught my eye. They are labeled Ubi SoftDisk X of 3High DensityAt the top they say "Volume Special #125B-11F2"Not sure what I'm looking at, I thought maybe it was a game, but it doesn't say. And there's only Disk 1 & 2Did I find some old internal Ubisoft documents from 1993?I'm a Mid 20s Zoomer so I never used floppy disks, is this just some game?I'm planning on getting a Floppy Disk Reader anyways.
>>11672946>run a debian live usb/cd>open terminal>sudo apt update>sudo apt install gddrescue>move write protect switch on floppy to locked and put it in the drive>sudo ddrescue -v -d -b 512 -r 100 /dev/fd0 [target filename].img [target filename].log>wait>upload the img fileThere you go
>>11672946https://www.preservegames.org/2018/05/floppy-disk-dumping-guide.html
>zoomer in charge of historical treasurewe're cooked
>>11672946I'd guess it says Volume Serial rather than special, but the other anons here are right. Follow either one and you should be able to get an image of it created and uploaded.
>>11672946>apparently modern OSs can try to fuck with the data as soon as you read, so research first before trying to read it!>find safe way to access data>back up data >determine if it is anything relevant/lookrarewow>reveal to the public that you have rare dataz>hoard data>dab on betakiddies
>>11674218>>apparently modern OSs can try to fuck with the data as soon as you read, so research first before trying to read it!They do, when I tried to read my old floppy disks with an adapter on Windows 10 it immediately would write that stupid "System Volume Information" folder to them as soon as they were accessed.I highly recommend setting the read-only tab if the disk isn't set to read-only already. Though honestly, I would not use Windows for this kind of thing anyway. If I was using said adapter to read actual historical disks instead of just my childhood floppies I would have not trusted Windows to not mess with them.
>>11672946Pretty cool stuff, keep us posted.
>>11672946>high-density>same size and weight as other floppieswhat a load of horse shit
>>11672946Do what these guys said anon>>11672979>>11673027Get you a USB floppy drive, dump that shit and put it on archive.org. Nice find
>>11672946where did you get these disks?
>>11674295So what would you suggest?I have an old Chromebook I flashed fedora onto, could that work?
bump
>>11674779it should, as long as it has normal usb ports
>>11674779That could work if you know what you are doing with dd, but like I said, make sure to have all of them set to be write-protected before you do anything. Both to prevent anything from being automatically written to them, as well as accidently wiping them.Problem is, a lot of those USB floppy drives suck, and even the ones that don't aren't that great, especially with anything that wasn't standard IBM 1.44 formats. Ideally you would want to access them with an actual floppy drive, not a USB one. And not just read the file system but actually image the disk, preferably with something even better than dd that reads the disk at the absolute lowest level possible such as a Kryoflux or Greaseweasell.A Kryoflux can be pretty expensive for someone who doesn't access all sorts of floppies, especially non-standard ones, often, Greaseweasell was made as a cheaper open-source alternative. These are hardware devices mind you, not just software. Basically they are a little circuitboard that plugs into an actual floppy drive and lets you access them at very low levels to read as much of the surface content of the disk as possible.Whatever you do, make sure the disks are set to read-only before you put them into the drive.
Cool find anon, I wish you luck with your recovery endeavours.It's actually pretty cool reading the replies in this thread, I work with old tech every day for my job (mostly backup tapes like LTO or sometimes even 8mm). Using Windows for this stuff is a bad idea, not just because of alterations to data, but poor driver support for hardware like this and a multitude of other headaches if/when you manage to get a driver working. Any linux system will be fine. Best advice is to always ensure read-only tab is set.I suppose it depends on how the data was recorded to the disk, as to how 'available' it will be to you, absolute best case it may appear like a standard file system when mounted (like LTFS (though that is tape), though odds are good it will be FAT or vfat, or possibly tar), though it's likely you'll need to use 'dd' to grab the data off the disk. It *may* be pertinent to preserve the blocking structure, but that mostly means working out what the block size is from the disk (hint: check dmesg for the expected blocksize when you run dd with bs=1 and use that as the value), but I would kinda expect floppies to be mostly cut and dry.It's been a hell of a long time since I've had to deal with floppies at work so my advice might be a touch wrong though I hope it helps you or any other anons (especially if they encounter any old backup tapes) :)
I've had bad luck with floppies on my old xp machine, 1 for reading of pc stuff and 2 making atari st games, seems to be at least a couple of bad files usually, sometimes writing works then the 2nd time it doesn't.HOLY SHIT ITS RAYMAN JAG SOURCE CODENot really, could be just some atari st demo.For truly rare discs they use a thing called a grease weasel, it can read data even if a computer says its unreadable by reading the magnetic flux. Its pretty expensive and I'm not trying to force you to get one, just saying its what some people use.>>11676028like he said
>>11676214>Its pretty expensive and I'm not trying to force you to get one, just saying its what some people use.They're like $20-30 USD, I wouldn't really consider that expensive personally.Maybe you're thinking of the Kryoflux of which the Greaseweazle is a cheaper alternative to, a Kryoflux is around $115-170 in US currency, so yeah, that one is expensive.You do need to supply your own floppy drive though, but those are hardly expensive either, assuming you don't have an old PC or something to pull it out of.
>>11676214> truly rare disksany disk. it does perfect copies of anything. very useful for backing up stuff with copy protections.
Any updates?
>>11672946It's the rare volume serial #nes-001. This is the first nintendo ds ever built. The last one sold in the internet for $13,000.Just ask some grandpa who still has a FDD to check what's on it. If it's not just some copies of games then consider what to do from there.
