Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 04 Aug 2000 15:09:29 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Micke Josefsson <mj@isy.liu.se>
To:        Network Administrator <admin@scls.lib.wi.us>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   RE: mount alien floppy? (Brother word processor)
Message-ID:  <XFMail.000804150929.mj@isy.liu.se>
In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20000804073716.03e5d190@mail.scls.lib.wi.us>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

On 04-Aug-00 Network Administrator wrote:
> I have some old Brother word processor 3.5" floppy diskettes with
> important 
> family data on them (my grandmother's memoirs, et. al.). Mounting one of 
> these floppies on a Windows box yields a "Format? (y/n)" type of error, 
> since the format is not msdos.
> 
> We have hard copies of the files but are hoping to migrate the data to 
> Windows (grandma's just not ready for BSD ;-). I would like to avoid a 
> time-consuming OCR conversion process or the costly $20 per floppy 3rd 
> party conversion service that Brother referred us to (there are lots of 
> disks to convert).
> 
> Is there a quick way to mount and read Brother formatted floppies in
> FreeBSD?
> 
> I would be very happy if files could be recovered whole, but happy enough
> if I could just read the data onto the HD for further inspection and 
> handling. Open to any suggestions.

I am not familiar with Brother format of floppies but I am pretty sure BSD
cannot handle them. Just for inspection you could use dd to get an image of
them to a file. If you are lucky some cut and paste could do the rest. If
there are many disks then this process should really be automated. Does
anyone here have specs for Brother floppies?

/Micke

PS. Given a dd-image as above it really can not be all that difficult to
decipher what is going on and make a short program to read it. Reading from
disk and writing is another more complex...


----------------------------------
Michael Josefsson, MSEE
mj@isy.liu.se

This message was sent by XFMail
running on FreeBSD 3.5-STABLE
----------------------------------


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?XFMail.000804150929.mj>