Problems reading 3.5" floppy disks

[Katy Rawdon]

Hi everyone,

I am new to this group and glad to have found it.

I am in the midst of setting up a basic forensics workstation for use in our department, to create disk images of old disks found in our collections (of which we have many).

I am currently having issues with reading 3.5" floppy disks. I did figure out that the reason our (cheap, basic) 3.5" external drive won't work with our Tableau USB write blocker is because Tableau USB write blockers don't recognize most USB external 3.5" floppies. Fun. 

The other I'm having is that when I try read a disk, I get the message "You need to format the disk in drive A before you can use it." I know that this message can appear when a disk is bad, but it's happened with every floppy I've tried, so... Maybe the drive is bad? Maybe it's not capable of reading older floppies? Any thoughts?

If it's a drive issue, we can certainly replace it, but I could really use some suggestions as to what set up people are using for their older floppies. 

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Best,

Katy

--

Katy Rawdon

Coordinator of Technical Services

Special Collections Research Center

Temple University Libraries

Philadelphia, PA 19122

(215) 204-5250

kra...@temple.edu 

 

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[Donald Mennerich]

Katy, 

The error means your probably trying to read a disk with a filesystem that your operating system doesn't recognize, e.g. an HFS files system being used with a Windows filesystem. You might need to look into a specialized floppy driver like a KryoFlux or do the imaging on a OS that recognizes the files system (you can run FTK imager on the command line of a Mac for instance) .  And yes, Tableau write blockers will not work with usb floppy drives. 

Don

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[L Snider]

Hi Katy,

Don gave you the answer for your format error below.

One other thing I thought I would mention is that I have found that sometimes internal floppy drives will read a disk when the external floppy drive won't read it (this assumes they can read the filesystem). Disks can sometimes be read on one, but not on the other...So I always want both an internal and external floppy drive in a workstation. Not that this will help with the current issue...but it may help down the road.

Cheers

Lisa

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Lisa Snider
Electronic Records Archivist
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 7219
Austin, Texas 78713-7219
P: 512-232-4616
www.hrc.utexas.edu

[Simon Spero]

Getting this error is often a good sign! It means that the drive is working... If it's just filesystem issues  you can install bitcurator in a virtual machine .

That should give you most of the tools you need to get files off most filesystems.  Some disks might even be directly mountable.

Mark Matienzo did an introductory talk at code4lib 2011 which might be helpful.  http://code4lib.org/conference/2011/Matienzo (slides + video + glasses)

Simon

P.s.

[On a related but completely opposite note: under at least Mac os lion, if you connect a usb floppy, it will be ignored, but if you have a virtualbox virtual machine with XP running, attach the drive to that, then detach it, Mac os will see the drive and mount it (even if it was an HFS formatted disk that XP couldn't touch)]

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[Seth Shaw]

A slight correction: FTK Imager doesn't care if the OS recognizes the high-level format, so long as the floppy-drive controller can read the bits (low-level format, e.g. MFM) FTK Imager will image it. For example, more recent HFS formatted disks that aren't understood by Windows (without additional drivers) can be imaged using FTK Imager running on Windows whereas older MAC disks using the low-level GCR format could not be imaged. The key is whether the floppy-drive controller recognizes the low-level encoding (this is where Kryoflux shines). The error being reported could be due to either formats being unrecognized.

 - Seth

[Katy Rawdon]

Thanks for the great replies, everyone. I did try reading the disk using FTK Imager, and while I avoided the "need to format" message, FTK specifically told me that the filesystem is unrecognizable. So, that is definitely the issue. I'm going to see if I can find a machine with an internal drive, and try a Mac as well. I've also wanted to play with BitCurator for a while, so this may be the time to install it and see what happens.

We had thought previously about purchasing a Kryoflux, but for various reasons we wanted to try to get away with a cheaper, more standard drive. But obviously, that's not working very well! 

Thanks again,

Katy

[Matthew McKinley]

I'll also chime in as a collection I imaged recently contained mostly pre-mid-90's Mac formatted 3.5" floppies.

I did figure out that my Windows machine didn't recognize the HFS filesystem, but the same disks were not getting read on another Ubuntu machine. Turns out they were written with an early Mac disk drive that physically wrote to disks in a different way than almost any other floppy drive (at a variable speed instead of a constant speed, to pack more data on the disk). There's more info in this forum thread:

http://macintoshgarden.org/forum/reading-800k-discs-in-2011

Long story short I had to source a Mac with a Superdrive (which is a floppy drive that can read/write at this variable speed and also, confusingly, the name of a newer Mac product) and found a late 90s Powermac, one of the last models before the candy-colored iMacs took over. I use this machine with DiskCopy to write the disk to .img image format, transfer the .img files over a closed ethernet network to my main Ubuntu imaging station, the use FTKImager to convert to raw (.001) disk image files.

Just another option if you still can't read the floppies.

Matthew McKinley
Digital Project Specialist, University of California, Irvine
about.me

[Mark A. Matienzo]

I overwhelmingly recommend the KryoFlux, but if pricing is an issue, I'd also recommend looking for a Catweasel, which will read GCR disks. Note that all double-density Mac disks (regardless if they're HFS or MFS) are GCR-encoded, while all high-density Mac disks are MFM-encoded.

Mark A. Matienzo <ma...@matienzo.org>

Director of Technology, Digital Public Library of America

[L Snider]

Has anyone used the DiscFerret? I came across it a while back and see it in the thread that Matthew shared...I wasn't sure if it still existed, or went anywhere.

Cheers

Lisa

[Alex Garnett]

I'm pretty sure a Catweasel would still be findable, as I had to dig one up not too long ago, though rather than having to play with floppy drive controllers, it might be easier, more economic, and more fun (wow!) to do as Matt MicKinley did and get a 95-97 PowerMac from eBay or a local vintage computing shop, as they're really the sweet spot in terms of being able to read old floppies and connect to modern ethernet networks without much fuss.

You'll want to be fairly certain that the disks are actually Macintosh compatible before you make such a purchase, but given that they're 3.5" disks and unreadable in Windows I think that's overwhelmingly likely.

[Katy Rawdon]

I am actually fairly certain that the disks I have are *not* Mac, but of course I could be wrong... A Catweasel is a a definite possibility. I'd also be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully used the tools on BitCurator to solve this type of problem.

Thanks again to everyone!

-Katy

[Simon Spero]

Discferret is alive enough that as of August 27th they were planning on doing another run of boards. There doesn't seem to have been too much active development over the past year based on mercurial repository, but there's been some, and the code is open. 
If you have the right kit (or ask EE to use theirs) you can run off your own board; this might work out more expensive than KF, depending on what they charge for software, and how much you have to pay for getting the board made.

If you can get a DF board for cheap by being a new testbed, that might be a win; the software is going to be rougher round the edges, but on the other hand you have lower level access to the acquisition processes, so can do more probabilistic reasoning about the most likely state of the disk.

KF is a safe choice, and the hardware price is not huge; an in-house  built ferret, with custom designed and painted enclosure has more geek cred, especially if you mod the microcode.

Simon

p.s.
Of course the real answer are scanning squids. If only there was some expertise and equipment at some university with an Institute for Technology in the Humanities... (Or pop over to Gaithersburg or Laurel)

[L Snider]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for that information, appreciate it!

Scanning squids? Is that not a microscope? Do tell more, I am curious!

Cheers

Lisa

[Porter Olsen]

Hi Katy,
BitCurator, or rather, the BitCurator environment, is a highly customized version of Ubuntu Linux that can be run either as a virtual machine or as a stand-alone operating system, so BitCurator's ability to read the disk will match that of Ubuntu Linux 12.04. If the problem you're experiencing is a hardware limitation--i.e., the USB drive you have doesn't support the disk size or type you're trying to read--then BitCurator won't be able to do much for you.

If it's a software limitation, then you can either use the Mounter tool to mount the disk read-only, or Guymager to create a disk image. Both tools are described in this walk-through from the BitCurator wiki. http://wiki.bitcurator.net/index.php?title=Creating_a_Disk_Image_Using_Guymager

Hope that helps, and let me know how things go!

Porter

[Katy Rawdon]

Hi Porter,

I just installed BitCurator on my computer last week, and am puttering around in it (and liking it very much). It does appear that I've been able to successfully image this same troublesome 3.5" floppy using BitCurator, which is absolutely fantastic. Now I just need to do some more puttering and figure out how to get files out of the image, poke at it, transfer the image and files out of BC to our server, etc. 

Best,

Katy

[Porter Olsen]

That's great! Unfortunately, mounting disk images can be as challenging as accessing the original media, especially if you don't know the original file system of the disk. The most recent version of BitCurator, v. 0.5.0, includes a Nautilus script that will mount disk images, but it presently only supports FAT and NTFS file systems, so it may not work with your disk image (especially if it's an HFS file system).

Alternatively, you can try accessing the disk image with FTK Imager, which is actually really good at mounting disk images even when their metadata is unknown. You might want to create a shared directory between BitCurator and the host OS so you can easily work with images in either OS. Here's a link on how to create a shared directory in BitCurator: http://wiki.bitcurator.net/index.php?title=Configuring_Media_Devices_for_Use_with_VirtualBox

Porter

[Katy Rawdon]

Oh, yay! The shared directory instructions are exactly what I was looking for. No idea why I had such a hard time finding them. I have FTK Imager and am more familiar with it than with Bitcurator, so this will be a huge help.

Thanks!

Katy

[Kam Woods]

Regarding mounting HFS/HFS+ disk images - I'm afraid I put slightly outdated information in the last (0.5.0) release notes. You *can*, in fact, mount HFS and HFS+ disk images now simply by right-clicking and selecting "Mount Disk Image". They will mount on the desktop after you enter the root password (bcadmin). To unmount any disk image, you can right-click on the *image* file (not the mounted disk icon) and select "Unmount disk image" from the scripts menu.

Cheers,

Kam

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[Alex Garnett]

Yup -- Ubuntu can mount HFS/HFS+ disks or disk images (but not write to them), but that doesn't solve the problem of mechanically incompatible floppies.

-alex

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[Kam Woods]

Yes, indeed. This was simply a clarification of regards to Porter's previous comment on functionality in BitCurator, which provides additional scripting to simplify the process of mounting a variety of file systems contained within forensically-packaged images, not just raw disk images.

Regarding Simon's previous comments on DiscFerret. While it would be pretty ninja to roll your own, I'd caution that the board includes a number of tightly-packaged ICs and surface-mount components. If you don't have a moderate electronics background, or are not at least comfortable using an SMD rework station, building one would be...a significant undertaking.

Kam

[Nico Bierhoff]

LS,

I have had a similar problem. 2 floppy drives of ~18 years old - unreadable in W7 with an external USB A:\ drive. With the error "you need to format the disk in drive a: before you can use it".

Here's how I solved it:

With a Acronis True Image Premium 2014 (boot disk) - this starts the True Image recovery program. I've hooked up the same USB A:\ drive to the same computer.

- First I made a sector by sector backup of the drives. Sector by sector backup is needed because drives of 18 years old are more than likely to have a couple of bad/unreadable sectors. This way, the image will continue if it encounters an error
-- The A:\ usb drive may not be recognized immediately by True image - you may need to manually add the drive.
-- Make sure you set the floppy disks to "read only" by using the tab on the bottom left corner of the back of the disk. This way you won't accidentally overwrite the disks you're trying to recover.
- The second step is to recover individual files, this can be done in the recover menu. I've selected the sector by sector images. Then you're able to "see" what's on the disk and select the files you need. You can also select them all of course.

Hope this may help someone in the future. Best thing about True Image is it's a fairly affordable program and you don't need to mount anything in *nix OS's, which may be daunting to some.

Cheers,

Nico Bierhoff.