Memory institutions are grappling with the challenges posed by digital carriers in their collections. While solutions for more recent carriers like hard drives, optical discs, and flash storage are readily available, the landscape becomes trickier when dealing with older formats such as floppy disks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to source the hardware, such as 5.25”floppy drives. There are many boards that can read flux streams, including the KryoFlux, and the Award-winning Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux can help to get started. But KryoFlux is somewhat limited in the disk formats it can interpret and might be too expensive for smaller institutions. We came together as practitioners because we encountered disk formats that required additional efforts to read and extract files. We explored hardware such as Greaseweazle and using FluxEngine software to read less common disk formats. Sharing the knowledge we have gained, this tutorial and workshop present an opportunity for participants to delve into these formats, examining them from both hardware and formatting perspectives.
The session will start with a tutorial designed to showcase various options and tools (FluxEngine, GreaseWeazle), demonstrating how to make aging equipment compatible with contemporary machines. At the end of the tutorial, participants should have the knowledge to build their own forensic workstation for 5.25”and 3.5”floppy disks.
Commencing with case studies, the workshop in the second half of the session will unravel the complexities of dealing with obscure formats and share valuable lessons learned. Participants will be equipped with practical tips and tricks for identification and handling, including utilizing Hex Editors and using tools for specific obscure disk formats (such as WANG). The aim is to empower participants with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate the challenges associated with older formats.
citation: Talboom, L., Thorsted, T., Kata, E., & Knowles, C. (2024). A Guide to Imaging Obscure Floppy Disk Formats. iPRES 2024, Ghent, Belgium. Zenodo. A Guide to Imaging Obscure Floppy Disk Formats
Best to use just original hardware. (And making backup disks).
Or emulators.
I wonder who still needs creating disk images.
Almost all software is available on the web or even still for sale (used).
So it’s mainly for user data or extremely rare or expensive software.
This is true for popular, mainstream software on PC and Macintosh platforms. It is almost universally true of the extremely popular home computing platforms like Apple or Sinclair. It is absolutely not true for many niche or older systems; a lot of software is just lost for older Unix workstations, business machines, pre-Unix graphical workstations, etc. That software is often not written on convenient 5.25" or 3.5" floppy disks, and when it is on standard disks, it’s frequently not in a format that is easily read on commodity systems and drives.
I have a half a dozen boxes of hard-sectored 5.25" disks for some kind of 8-bit probably-CP/M machine for which I have neither documentation or hardware. If there is any interesting software on those disks, it will absolutely only be saved by creating disk images, probably as flux readings so that the sectoring can be retrieved via a modern drive with support only for soft sectoring.
What about cassette tape, is there much to save in that format?
Is there any digital certified tape still around?
This for home computer use, not DEC tape II.
In the same way that, in theory, playing the flute is blowing in one end and moving your fingers up and down the holes. In practice, details are everything.
One of those eBay lots had an educational game, “Ten Little Robots.” After cracking it, I couldn’t find any copies of it online, which seemed odd. Surely everything has been cracked? Perhaps it was just mis-named or mis-filed? Then I found another disk that seemed to be a first-time preservation. And another. And it slowly dawned on me that maybe not everything has been cracked.
I mentioned this to Jason Scott, and he set me straight. Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed. Nobody got kudos for cracking “Irregular Spanish Verbs in the Future Tense,” no BBS would waste the hard drive space to host it, and no user would sacrifice their phone line to download it. So it never got preserved in any form.
There are people very dedicated to archiving original home computer game cassettes. Because the bandwidth isn’t very high and it’s all in the audio domain, reasonable archival copes can be made with tape players and WAV capture. There’s at least one claimed “complete” archive of C64 game tapes on archive.org
To actually get these WAV files into a home computer can be a whole other problem. Signal levels typically need to be quite high, much higher than modern equipment is happy reproducing.
I don’t know how easily the old single-sided data streamer cassettes can be archived, though
Reading audio tapes is easy. I’ve done that several years ago for (personal) C64 and vic20 tapes. I don’t remember exactly. One can enhance the volume while recording or even later a bit. I think I used Audacity. Maybe there is some better software/hardware now maybe with auto volume.
The sources (disks and tapes) are not getting better, so I wouldn’t wait for another years.
I was surprised that there’s still much to do.
Yes for very rare computers. Or when someone passes away or when purchasing or getting used media.
The other question is, how much one really needs that data. But sometimes the data is unknown and one is curious.
If it’s really important, there are service companies doing it (for some systems). Or maybe museums. If known/available I would first check them on the original hardware (if it’s really worth).