Floppy drive not seen in disk management

[elizabeth...@gmail.com]

Hello list

I’ve been imaging floppies from my personal stash, then processing them and documenting the process.

 

1. I managed to image all the disks (31), including the HFS formats with BitCurator and FTK Imager Lite.

2. On a purely experimental front, I also tried to mount the disks as trialled in SAA Digital Forensics: Advanced class (pp.23-25 of the Advanced workbook – Seeing attached devices). 11 disks did not mount - 3 are HFS and one has an unrecognised file system (most likely from corruption) - the contents were generated in Windows; the 7 others are all Windows format.

3. The floppy disk drive appears in the device manager list on two different laptops, one running Windows 7, the other 8.1

4. The drive does not appear in disk management in Windows 7 or 8.1, even with the disks I could mount. I checked the setting to show hidden drives, rebooted the computers and it still doesn't appear.

Any suggestions as to why this has occurred?

I'm wondering how could I image the disks but the disks themselves won't mount?  

Cheers

Elizabeth

[Porter Olsen]

Hi Elizabeth,

Which tool are you using to mount the images (sorry, I don't have the workbook you mention)? Do they fail to mount in both BitCurator and FTK Imager? Also, can you view the disk image content in FTK Imager as an "evidence device"? It might also be helpful to identify the size and file system type of the disk images that do not mount properly. To do so, insert the disk into the computer (write protected, of course) and when the image appears, right click on it and select "Properties."

If I were to guess, I wold say the problem is that you have some HFS (not HFS+) disks in the batch and they're the ones that aren't mounting. But again, that's just a guess.

I'm afraid I don't follow you on 3 and 4. What kind of floppy drive (internal or USB) are you using? Has it stopped working since you created the original images?

Best,

Porter

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[elizabeth...@gmail.com]

Porter, thanks for your questions. Hopefully I've managed to give clarification below.

My confusion arises not because I'm having difficulty with mounting the images - it's some of the actual original physical floppies that won't mount! So I'm wondering how did I manage to image the same floppies in BitCurator and FTK Imager?

For the images, in FTK Imager, I can view them as an "evidence device" and can mount them, even those that are HFS formatted.

For the actual physical floppies, I know why 4 won't mount (Mac and an unidentified file system) but the 7 confirmed Windows floppies that won't mount have me stumped. I've got two external USB floppy drives and both are working fine. The section from the SAA workbooks is entitled, "Seeing attached devices (whether or not they're mounted) - In Windows", basically it explains how to get to disk management to see attached devices. I have been able to see the hard drive, dvd drive, external hard drives and flash drives when attached, but neither a mounted image nor a mounted physical floppy appears as a volume in the list.

Thanks for your thoughts and time,
Elizabeth

[Porter Olsen]

Thanks for the clarification, Elizabeth. My guess would be that you have some bad sectors on the disks that prevent Windows from reading the file system data properly. It's not surprising that you would still be able to image the disks, since most disk imaging tools ignore file system data (they capture it, but don't require it to be intact). If the images could be read as evidence devices but not mounted through FTK, I'd be more confident of my answer, but that's still my guess.

Porter

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[elizabeth...@gmail.com]

Thanks a lot, Porter.