[VERY OT] Retrieving data from low density 3.5 inch floppy

The father of a friend has passed away.
He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 70 - with a 4865 
disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].

It was marginally readable with a modern high density drive.
[ I read it once
   prepared a directory on my hard drive to receive its contents
   haven't been able to read it since ]

I think I'm combating an old problem.
In theory, a modern 3.5 high density drive should be able to read/write 
a low density disk. In reality there were physical alignment problems in 
early days.

Any suggestions?
Widow would like to use her husband's own composition for the obituary.

There is a physical deadline of noon 2/10/2005 for that to occur.

If that is not successful, I think it would be appreciated if what he 
had written could be retrieved [There is material other than his own 
obituary on the disk].

Richard Owlett wrote:
> The father of a friend has passed away.
> He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 70 - with a 4865
> disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].
> 
> It was marginally readable with a modern high density drive.
> [ I read it once
>   prepared a directory on my hard drive to receive its contents
>   haven't been able to read it since ]
> 
> I think I'm combating an old problem.
> In theory, a modern 3.5 high density drive should be able to read/write
> a low density disk. In reality there were physical alignment problems in
> early days.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> Widow would like to use her husband's own composition for the obituary.
> 
> There is a physical deadline of noon 2/10/2005 for that to occur.
> 
> If that is not successful, I think it would be appreciated if what he
> had written could be retrieved [There is material other than his own
> obituary on the disk].

I have some old 3.5 inch floppy drives that I can Fedex to you to try.

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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"Richard Owlett" schrieb
> The father of a friend has passed away.
> He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 
> 70 - with a 4865 disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].
>
Sorry to hear, my condolences on both tragedies.
Does the IBM Wheelwriter still exist? Does it have 
another output besides printed paper? Can it read the 
diskettes? The you might be able to pipe it into another
computer that emulates a printer.

At the very least you might print it out and feed it
at an OCR.

This reminds me that when we were to throw away the last
computer still capable of reading 5 1/4" floppies, I 
spent half a day feeding my floppies to this beast.

Another solution, though this involves $$$, is to give
them to a data recovery specialist. They usually 
resurrect the data from dead harddisks, but they might
also do floppies.

One word of caution: when you think you have a machine,
don't throw the most valuable disk at it from the start.
I think that trying to read them too much doesn't do them
any good.

Another idea: if you have Linux, you could do
$ dd if=/dev/fd0h720 of=disk.img
and then try to work on the image. dd just copies what
comes along and does not care about directories / files
etc. You can then at your leisure work on disk.img.
You might also want to try ddrescue which then skips 
over phyiscal read errors, IIRC.
Normal programs such copy or cp despair and abandon
quite early if there are errors.

Sorry, I can't help you further.
Martin

Martin Blume wrote:

> "Richard Owlett" schrieb
> 
>>The father of a friend has passed away.
>>He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 
>>70 - with a 4865 disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].
>>
> 
> Sorry to hear, my condolences on both tragedies.
> Does the IBM Wheelwriter still exist? Does it have 
> another output besides printed paper? Can it read the 
> diskettes? 

It was the Wheelwriter's drive that failed.


The you might be able to pipe it into another


> [snip]
> 
> Another idea: if you have Linux, you could do
> $ dd if=/dev/fd0h720 of=disk.img
> and then try to work on the image. dd just copies what
> comes along and does not care about directories / files
> etc. You can then at your leisure work on disk.img.
> You might also want to try ddrescue which then skips 
> over phyiscal read errors, IIRC.
> Normal programs such copy or cp despair and abandon
> quite early if there are errors.

I don't have Linux at the moment. But, I've installed Microsoft Virtual 
PC with that in mind. Local bookstores only had one title for 
introduction to Linux which included a matching distro.



> 
> Sorry, I can't help you further.

You have helped and triggered some more ideas.
Thanks.

> Martin
> 
> 
> 
> 

"Richard Owlett" schrieb
> 
> It was the Wheelwriter's drive that failed.
> 
Can you exchange against a newer drive?

You could also search for the oldest PC around that 
has a 3.5" drive. Schools might still have very old
beasts. This assumes that the Wheelwriter's drive
was still within tolerances before failure.

You might also approach IBM.

> 
> I don't have Linux at the moment. But, I've installed
> Microsoft Virtual PC with that in mind. Local 
> bookstores only had one title for  introduction to 
> Linux which included a matching distro.
> 
For first tests you might try a version that runs from
CD only such as Knoppix (www.knopper.net/knoppix).
There is no installation required.

HTH
Martin

Many years ago I had a BBC micro which had 3 1/2" floppy drives.  There
was a utility that I had "Disk Doctor" that allowed me to read the
tracks off the disc in a hex editor format together with the ASCII
translation of the data.  Maybe someone knows of a similar DOS based
utility that might allow you to get enough of the data to be useful.
If not then it should be possible to write a small utility to read the
disk absolute sectors using dos calls and then save this off to a file
on your hard drive ready for analysis.

Ian

Richard Owlett wrote:

> The father of a friend has passed away.
> He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 70 - with a 4865
> disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].
> 
> It was marginally readable with a modern high density drive.
> [ I read it once
>    prepared a directory on my hard drive to receive its contents
>    haven't been able to read it since ]
> 
> I think I'm combating an old problem.
> In theory, a modern 3.5 high density drive should be able to read/write
> a low density disk. In reality there were physical alignment problems in
> early days.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> Widow would like to use her husband's own composition for the obituary.
> 
> There is a physical deadline of noon 2/10/2005 for that to occur.

Hmmmm... it shows up on my newreader that you are already past that time
when you sent this message.  So I don't know if my response is guaranteed
to be too late???
 
> If that is not successful, I think it would be appreciated if what he
> had written could be retrieved [There is material other than his own
> obituary on the disk].

Since you are in Windoze land try 
http://www.winimage.com/
Handles 160Kb to 2.88 Mb formats, so it says, on the version I have, 
which is packaged with some Powerquest (backup) software.
Who knows, however, if the wheelwriter disk is formatted in anything that
can be recognized.

Hope it helps, and isn't too late.  Sorry for your loss.

Thanks, Steve

Thank you all for your assistance.

Steve had recommended I try http://www.winimage.com/
It is oriented to format conversion and apparently handles that nicely.
It has problems with corrupted sectors. But its target isn't data recovery.

Someone local has just purchased a data recovery program as his church 
had just had a similar problem. We'll try that this weekend.


Thanks again.

Richard Owlett ha scritto:
> The father of a friend has passed away.
> He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 70 - with a 4865 
> disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].
> 
> It was marginally readable with a modern high density drive.
> [ I read it once
>   prepared a directory on my hard drive to receive its contents
>   haven't been able to read it since ]
> 
> I think I'm combating an old problem.
> In theory, a modern 3.5 high density drive should be able to read/write 
> a low density disk. In reality there were physical alignment problems in 
> early days.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> Widow would like to use her husband's own composition for the obituary.
> 
> There is a physical deadline of noon 2/10/2005 for that to occur.
> 
> If that is not successful, I think it would be appreciated if what he 
> had written could be retrieved [There is material other than his own 
> obituary on the disk].
Hi,
Try to scan the floppy with R-Studio program.
Sometimes it can rescue a lot of things :)

Bye
Giuseppe


-- 
---
Ciao
Giuseppe
-----------------------------------
http://digilander.libero.it/nokappa

Giuseppe� wrote:

> Richard Owlett ha scritto:
> 
>> The father of a friend has passed away.
>> He had written his own obituary on an IBM Wheelwriter 70 - with a 4865 
>> disk drive [3.5 inch low density ].
>>
>> It was marginally readable with a modern high density drive.
>> [ I read it once
>>   prepared a directory on my hard drive to receive its contents
>>   haven't been able to read it since ]
>>
>> I think I'm combating an old problem.
>> In theory, a modern 3.5 high density drive should be able to 
>> read/write a low density disk. In reality there were physical 
>> alignment problems in early days.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>> Widow would like to use her husband's own composition for the obituary.
>>
>> There is a physical deadline of noon 2/10/2005 for that to occur.
>>
>> If that is not successful, I think it would be appreciated if what he 
>> had written could be retrieved [There is material other than his own 
>> obituary on the disk].
> 
> Hi,
> Try to scan the floppy with R-Studio program.
> Sometimes it can rescue a lot of things :)
> 
> Bye
> Giuseppe
> 
> 

Thanks, but they seem to be robust undelete utilities.
Further thought causes me to suspect that I have corrupted directory and 
FAT portions of floppy in such a manner as they have become physically 
unreadable. The data area may be readable.

It was recorded by a 720k drive. I suspect portion overwritten with 
1.44M drive in "compatibility" mode.