external 3.5 floppy disk reader

[Lauren Goodley]

I cannot get Bitcurator to recognize my 3.5 inch floppy disk reader. An icon on the bottom of the screen shows USB activity, and shows the floppy disk drive, but it does not show up as an icon on the left that I can mount.
Amazon reviews say my disk drive is not the best (Sabrent) so maybe it's just bad. Any other ideas?

Thanks, all,
Lauren

[Porter Olsen]

Hi Lauren,

Can you tell me a little more about your setup? Specifically:

- Are you running BitCurator as a virtual machine or as the primary OS?

- Do you know that the floppy drive will read your disks? As a general rule, USB floppy drives will read 1.44MB Mac or Windows formatted disks and 740KB  Windows formatted disk (but not Mac formatted).

-  Are you using a write blocker or USB bridge? USB bridge write blockers don't work with USB floppy drives. To write protect a 3.5" floppy disk, flick the tab on the side so it's open.

Porter

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[Lauren Goodley]

Thanks Porter.
-BitCurator as a virtual machine (on a Mac)
-! The disks may be Mac formatted. I will ask the creator!
-I was depending on the tab open on the disk (so I can see through it) and the read-only on BitCurator.

The disks say things like:
2HD IBM Format
nothing
FujiFilm MF 2DD
nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing
Maxell 2HD

Assuming they are Mac formatted, how can I tell if they are 1.44MB? And, what are my options--an internal/non USB floppy drive?

Thanks very much,
Lauren

[Lauren Goodley]

Update:
I got BitCurator VM to recognize, read the disk, and created a disk image (.E01).

Now, I'm getting this error when running Bitcurator reports:
>> ERROR!!! identify_filenames terminated with error:
 b'Traceback (most recent call last):\n  File "/usr/share/dfxml/python/identify_filenames.py", line 355, in <module>\n    read_filemap(rundb)\n  File "/usr/share/dfxml/python/identify_filenames.py", line 317, in read_filemap\n    raise RuntimeError("\\nERROR: No files detected in image file {}\\n".format(imagefile))\nRuntimeError: \nERROR: No files detected in image file /home/bcadmin/Desktop/SeveroPerez/FrogTownRegulars.E01\n\n'

AND, "Ubuntu 14.04 has experienced an internal error."

- These are definitely mac-formatted floppy disks
- The disks were created 1991-1998

Any suggestions?

Thanks, all,
Lauren

[Kam Woods]

The BitCurator reporting tools rely on The Sleuth Kit, which will not process any Apple file systems prior to HFS+, so the short answer is "the reporting tools won't work on these disks unless they're HFS+ formatted, which is unlikely for this date range".

BitCurator includes a tool called HFSExplorer (in the "Additional Tools" directory on the desktop) that will allow you to read 400K, 800K, and 1.4MB HFS-formatted floppies (but not earlier MFS format disks). However, HFSExplorer cannot talk to E01, so you need to extract the raw disk contents before trying that (there's a command line tool built into BitCurator called ewfexport that will do this for you).

Imaging early Mac floppies into EWF (E01) containers is generally not the best idea (unless you're insisting on E01 for long-term storage), since virtually every tool capable of access their contents expects a raw image.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcurator-users/996b7305-89b1-40a9-a48c-9b1ba070ee23%40googlegroups.com.

[Lauren Goodley]

Thanks for that, Kam. That's what I'm finding, that the BitCurator tools will not produce a report for the disks.
I will try ewfexport.

The next step is opening the dang files.

[Lauren Goodley]

Do you know of any instructions for using ewfexport? I can't find it on the BitCurator wiki...
Or, how to extract the raw file instead of EWF?

Thank you,
Lauren

On Thursday, October 8, 2015 at 3:07:53 PM UTC-5, Kam Woods wrote:

[Cal Lee]

On 10/13/2015 9:55 AM, Lauren Goodley wrote:
> Do you know of any instructions for using ewfexport? I can't find it on
> the BitCurator wiki...

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man1/ewfexport.1.html

You can also open a command terminal (click on the icon that looks like
a command prompt on the left side of the screen) in the BitCurator
environment and type ewfexport. You'll then see the various
command-line switches (configuration options) for running it.

- Cal

[elizabeth...@gmail.com]

Lauren

Have you been successful in using ewfexport?

Elizabeth

[helen....@nicholls.edu]

When I put a raw image file into HFSExplorer, it looks like it's converting dashes in my filenames to forward slashes (which it reads as subdirectories and can't open), and I wasn't able to change the names either (not that that's an ideal solution). FTK Imager seems to open files from Mac floppy E01 images just fine - what am I missing? When you say that most tools would need a raw image for Mac floppy files, what level of access am I missing out on with an E01 file? 

On Thursday, October 8, 2015 at 3:07:53 PM UTC-5, Kam Woods wrote:

[Kam Woods]

Hi Helen,

The BitCurator team is not the developer or maintainer of HFSExplorer (which does not - as an aside - have the capability to read E01 files, hence the suggestion to use raw). You may have encountered a bug. The developer's website is:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcurator-users/249b3e50-3c7b-46c5-86a8-dc5a43848944%40googlegroups.com.

[Kam Woods]

Oops. That was accidentally sent too soon. The full reply should have been:

Hi Helen,

The BitCurator team is not the developer or maintainer of HFSExplorer (which does not - as an aside - have the capability to read E01 files, hence the suggestion to use raw). You may have encountered a bug. The developer's website is:

http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/

At the bottom, you will find a link to the email address to report bugs.

Regards,

Kam