On Sat, 3 Sep 2005, Michael Hennebry wrote:
I'm trying to read some old (duh) 5 inch floppies with a borrowed drive on an FC3 box. Probabaly there is more than one format, but I'm not sure which has which. The usual result is that I can read the directory by clicking on a KDE icon, but get I/O errors when trying to read any of the files. Trying to mount with a mount command also results in an I/O error. If I couldn't read the directory, I'd suppose that I was out of luck. Is there a reason that the directory would be easier to read than the files? Any ideas on how to read the files?
I've seen this behaviour with old floppies -- I suspect there is a bad or marginal area on the disk. Since the data typically take much more space than the directory, the chances of a bad spot zapping data are much higher. You should try a different drive -- old drives are even less reliable than old floppies.
-- George N. White III <aa056@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
