hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3947.txt

Episode: 3947
Title: HPR3947: Archiving Floppy Disks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3947/hpr3947.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:46:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3947 for Tuesday 19 September 2023.
Today's show is entitled Archiving Floppy Discs.
It is hosted by Steve Sainer and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
This show describes how I go about Archiving Old Floppy Discs.
Hello Hacker Public Radio listeners, my name is Steve and I am your host today.
It has been a very long time since I have posted a show for Hacker Public Radio.
A good reason for that is that I sort of got out of listening to podcasts several years
ago kind of due to the pandemic situations and then over the last few years I've started
to listen to podcasts more and more including Hacker Public Radio.
Lately we've been low of shows and so I figured I should probably get one contributed.
A big thank you to all of the regular contributors that have been keeping Hacker Public Radio
going.
Appreciate your efforts there.
If you're like me and haven't posted a show for a long time now is a good time to do
it.
If you've never posted a show to Hacker Public Radio now is an excellent time to do that
as well.
So today I want to talk to you a little bit about how I archive floppy disks.
Now I suppose there's a few of you that don't even know what floppy disks are if you're
a little bit younger but back in the late 80s, early 90s when I was definitely getting
into computers, floppy disks were a common form of storage that we used.
A lot of times software was installed via floppy disks before CDs and DVDs became a thing.
And floppy disks were also a form of portable storage where you could store files and then
move them from computer to computer kind of like what we do with USB jump drives today.
So I have a ton of floppy disks saved from back in that era when I was using them.
Several boxes full that I have stored for many years now and I would like to get them
archived in a way that doesn't take up so much space is a little bit more reliable.
Floppy disks of course are magnetic media and magnetic media will degrade over time so
if I don't do this archiving now I might lose my opportunity to at some point.
You might be asking do I really need all of those floppy disks from back in that era?
Will I ever use that software again or anything like that?
The answer is probably not very much of it but there is a chance that I might want to
do a few things here and there and floppy disks were microscopic when compared to storage
mechanisms of today and so it's going to take very little storage real estate to save
everything so I might as well just go ahead and do that.
Very possibly there are some data files, some word processor documents or spreadsheet documents
from back then that I might want to look at again.
As far as the software itself most of it I'll probably never install again I'll probably
never have a computer that's running Windows 95 or even earlier than that.
However if there is like a word processor file or spreadsheet that I want to open it
might not be openable in any current modern day software and so what I may end up needing
to do is create a virtual machine with an old operating system say Windows 95 or something
and then actually install on that an old version of a word processor so that I can open
up one of those old files and maybe try to convert it to something that I can transfer
over to something more modern.
We try to create a PDF out of it or print it or whatever the case might be.
So that is why I am archiving all of these floppy disks.
So in order to do this archiving I need a computer that has a floppy disk drive.
Of course most computers nowadays don't have floppy disks anymore but I found laying
around an old IBM ThinkCenter desktop computer that has a 3.5 inch floppy drive in it as
well as a normal DVD ROM drive and a hard drive.
I probably could remove the DVD drive and put in a 5 and a quarter inch floppy disk drive
if I need to.
I think I have one laying around or I could get a hold of one.
For those that might not be familiar with floppy disks it might be worth talking just
a little bit about how they were constructed.
So the actual part that was used for storage was a disk-shaped piece of plastic that had
magnetic material on it that the disk heads could read and write data to.
And that disk was pretty flexible and delicate so it was then stored inside of kind of
an envelope of thicker, more rigid plastic and then that had a window in it that the
disk heads could then access the internal disk.
There were several sizes of those.
The 5 and a quarter inch disk was probably the most popular at least during the time that
I was using them.
There were bigger ones like 8 inch and I think even 12 inch disks that I never really
used.
Then kind of in the late 80s the 3 and a half inch floppy disk came out which was an advancement
in several different ways.
It was actually smaller but it was much more dense in terms of the amount of data that
it could handle.
It could handle more data in a smaller package.
And to protect the floppy disk even more the casing was even more rigid and thicker casing.
And the window where the disk heads would access the floppy part was actually covered with
a little sliding metal cover and when you would put it into the disk drive that cover would
open the heads could access the magnetic disk and when you pull it out the disk or the door
would close.
So most of the disks I have that I want to archive R3 and a half inch floppy disk so this
computer will do fine.
Like I say I could probably add a 5 and a quarter inch drive if I decide I want to.
Now I want to install a version of Linux on this computer because it has commands that
are useful for what I want to do to archive these floppy disks.
One little problem though is that this is a 32 bit computer and a lot of the modern
distributions have actually dropped support for 32 bit computers.
One distribution however that does still maintain a 32 bit version and a distribution that
I'm pretty familiar with is Slackware.
So I went and downloaded Slackware version 14.2 for 32 bit computers.
There is a newer version than that now but I'm mostly familiar with the 14.2 so I decided
to use that.
I installed it like you would normally install a Linux distribution.
I think I put it on a thumb drive and installed off of that.
So that is now my platform for archiving these floppy disks.
I have it setting on my desk so that I can easily reach the disk drive to put disks in
and out.
I have it connected to the network so I can SSH to it and run the commands there.
The actual archive files will then be stored on the hard drive of this computer and then
I can move them to another location as I see fit.
So now I'm ready to start archiving floppy disks.
I'm going to do that in two different ways.
So one of the types of floppy disks that I have contains software that you would install
on a computer.
That could be an operating system, it could be an application.
A lot of times a piece of software came as a collection of maybe three or four or five
or even more floppy disks and you would install that application by inserting the disks
one at a time.
For those kind of disks I want to make what I call a disk image.
I want to copy the entire contents of the floppy disk to a single file that will reside
on the Linux computer.
This is sort of like what you do if you make a disk image or an ISO image of a CD or DVD
ROM disk.
So to do that I first put the floppy disk into the computer and then I issue the following
command.
Again the command doesn't need to be run as root and it goes as follows, dd.
This is the fairly ubiquitous Linux dd command, dd space, if, if stands for input file and
if will equal the device file for the floppy disk that is slash dev slash fd zero.
If I had more than one floppy disk in the computer or floppy drive in the computer, one
of whom would be fd zero, the other one would be fd one depending on how they are connected
to each other.
So dd space, if equals slash dev slash fd zero, space, of which is the output file equals
some file name that the disk image will be named on the hard drive.
Sometimes I will name that with a .dsk extension for disk image or I've also seen IMG I think
for disk image.
You don't have to have any extension, you can use whatever you want to, it doesn't really
matter.
So again dd space, if equals slash dev slash fd zero, space, of equals file name, .dsk.
And that command is in the show notes.
Once you hit return, it will start reading data from the disk and storing it into the
file.
Now this will take maybe about 30 seconds depending on the size of the disk image.
Even in the three and a half inch floppy disks, there were two different sizes actually
in terms of the amount of data they could handle.
And originally they could handle 750 kilobytes of data.
Those later became known as the medium density disks and later they were with newer technology.
They could double that to 1.4 megabits or I'm sorry, megabytes of data.
So the size of the disk image will depend on the size of the actual floppy disk.
But after about 30 seconds or so, it will then read out how many bytes of data it copied
and you'll have a command prompt and that disk has been read.
You can now remove the disk from the computer, put another one in, do the same command until
you have a whole bunch of disk image files.
So that's how I make a disk image of an entire floppy disk.
Now it's worth noting that you can actually run that command in reverse and create a new
floppy disk from the disk image.
So say you have a blank floppy disk that's already formatted.
You can put that into the computer and you can run that DD command the opposite direction.
So DD space IF for input file equals the disk image file name and then OF equals slash
dev slash FD0.
That will then copy the contents of the disk image onto the floppy disk and now you have
a new floppy disk that was exactly the same as the original one.
That is a possibility that I could want to do in the future if I want to recreate some
of these floppy disks.
More likely though, like I said, I might create a virtual machine and you can use this disk
image file when you're setting up the virtual machine say virtual box or something like that.
You can go into the device settings, add a floppy disk drive and then point that floppy
disk drive at a disk image file and so when the operating system boots up, it will be
just like that disk was in the floppy disk drive and you can use it as you see fit.
You can then also while the operating system is running, you can detach the disk image and
attach another disk image, which is just like changing disks from one to another.
So that might be something that you would want to do with these disk images.
Now the other kind of disk is one that just simply has data files on it that I may have
stored like a word processing or a spreadsheet file on.
For those I don't want to actually make a disk image, I'd rather just copy the individual
files off of the disk and put them onto the hard drive.
So for that I'm going to mount the floppy disk just like you would mount any other hard
drive or optical drive or something of that sort.
The mount command I will give it the file system type of MSDOS, which is what all of these
would be formatted for.
Probably don't even need to give it the type because I think mount can kind of figure
that out on its own, but I did anyways.
So for that kind of a disk, I put the disk in the drive, I type mount space dash t space
MSDOS, space, and then that device name again slash dev slash FD0 space.
And now I need to put a mount point where this disk will be mounted in the Linux file system.
Slackware comes when you install Slackware, you get a slash MNT directory and inside
of there is a sub directory called floppy and that is exactly what that directory is intended
to be.
So I'll use that as the mount point.
Again, the full command is mount space slash t as in tango, space MSDOS, space slash dev
slash FD0, space slash MNT slash floppy.
Hit enter and now you will have mounted that floppy disk into the Linux file system.
You can now cd to slash MNT slash floppy.
You can now list the files in that directory with LS and you will see all of the files that
were on that floppy disk.
From here you can then copy those files to wherever you want to, probably onto a hard drive.
You can use the CP command, CP space, file name, space, then some path and file destination
file name.
If you have multiple files, you can use wildcards like copy star to some place or if you have
directories, a floppy disk can contain directories and you might use a copy dash R to recursively
copy an entire directory or maybe you want to like tar up all the files on the disk.
You can do that as well.
So after you've copied all the files that you care about over to some other location,
you need to get out of that mount point directory before you unmount.
So just type cd, hit enter, that will take you back to the root directory.
You can then type you mount for, that's you for unmount.
So you mount space slash MNT slash floppy and that will unmount the disk.
You can now take it off and take it out of the computer and put in another one and do
the same thing again.
And so that's how I make archives of my floppy disks.
Next step will then be to move all the files off of the hard drive of this computer over
probably to my NAS and let them sit there.
I could also burn them to a DVD or CD or something to that effect as well.
That's all I have for today.
I hope it was of use to somebody or at least interesting to listen to.
And I'll try not to be quite so long before I contribute another episode to Hacker
Public Radio and I hope others will do the same as well.
So I hope everybody has a good day and tune in next time for another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
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