Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:11:59 -0500 From: "Josh Paetzel" <jpaetzel@hutchtel.net> To: "Micke Josefsson" <mj@isy.liu.se>, "Network Administrator" <admin@scls.lib.wi.us> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: mount alien floppy? (Brother word processor) Message-ID: <004101bffe71$c6829770$40440ace@mark8> References: <XFMail.000804150929.mj@isy.liu.se>
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Micke Josefsson" <mj@isy.liu.se> To: "Network Administrator" <admin@scls.lib.wi.us> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 8:09 AM Subject: RE: mount alien floppy? (Brother word processor) > > 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... > > What you are asking for is deeply guarded ju-ju. Do you even know for sure if they are 1.44 meg floppies? Remember the old 720k floppies had different track widths than the 1.44 meg floppies and many 1.44 drives had problems reading them. Josh "Legacy Man" > ---------------------------------- > 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 > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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