Fostex FD-8 zip file reovery

[johnny...@gmail.com]

Does anyone know how I can recover many zip files filled with music that were created with my FD-8. The FD-8 is dead and won't read the zip drive and rep[air quotes are quite expensive. So, I now have all these zip disks and need to find a way to rip the audio from the disks into Windows or Mac. I understand from doing a little reading that the files are in Fostex's proprietary format, but I am hoping someone found a work-around for this?

[m...@yourocket.com]

On Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 3:04:12 PM UTC-6, Johnny Wathen wrote:
> Does anyone know how I can recover many zip files filled with music that were created with my FD-8. The FD-8 is dead and won't read the zip drive and rep[air quotes are quite expensive. So, I now have all these zip disks and need to find a way to rip the audio from the disks into Windows or Mac. I understand from doing a little reading that the files are in Fostex's proprietary format, but I am hoping someone found a work-around for this?

Any luck on this Johnny? I have about 30 zip250 disks with loads of original songs created on my FD-8 in the late 90s and early 2000s. My FD-8 went underwater during Katrina and my disks may or may not have been damaged by high-humidity in the aftermath when we had no power.

Even if I sent my disks to a recovery lab(probably too expensive) I'm not sure they could read the data due to Fostex's proprietary file system. Someone told me once that the audio files are actually .wav files but they are wrapped in some weird Fostex format and would need to be extracted with special software.
Any solutions or suggestions?

[Les Cargill]

Bear with me - this will be a project. The actual disk format for IOMEGA
ZIP drives on many Fostex recorders was called FDMS-3. I had a Fostex
VF16 and it used FDMS-3.

( I used to record 4-hour gigs with the VF16 and transfer all the files
using a variation of the C code from the FUSE file system at the link
below. Saved hours over realtime transfer over ADAT ).

You can read the entire disk as-if it were one big file - a .iso file.
There is a FUSE filesystem for Linux that reads FDMS-3 files ( which the
hard disk Fostex recorders used )

This seems to indicate that the FD-8 also used FDMS.

So if this is all true, you can ( with linux )

- plug the IOMEGA ZIP drive in.
- use the "dd" tool on Linux to make a .iso of the ZIP drives on your
local hard drive and
- using the FDMS FUSE file system on the resulting .iso
http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/fdmsfs

you might be able to recover the files.

I don't know to what extent any of this applies to Mac. On PC,
you might be able to run Linux in a VirtualBox virtual
machine. You can associate USB drives with the virtual Linux.

There are IOMEGA ZIP drives that connect USB on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Zip-100-Portable-Drive/dp/B00000J3Q7

You might be able to find a friendly helpful person at your local
Linux Users Group who'd help, or do the whole thing for
possibly a nominal fee.

Also also also - it could be that you could just buy a RasPi
and use that for this - connect a thumb drive and one of the IOMEGA ZIP
drives to the RasPi and write the files to the thumb drive.

--
Les Cargill