On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Jon Harris <[email protected]> wrote: > Disks in question are reporting they need to be formatted so I am guessing > they have lost(?) the correct bit/byte at the head of the disk and I don't > have my old tools to look at the bit and byte level of a drive.
Ick. That's not good. dd_rhelp just uses the regular floppy disk block interface the Linux kernel provides, so if the disk is actually scrambled at the bit level, it won't help. OTOH, if the low-level format is still good and it's just something like the boot record that's trashed, it should still do some good. Bits vs bytes, so to speak. Maybe hunt down an old copy of Norton Disk Editor for MS-DOS on the Interwebs? Other suggestions: * Try cleaning the drive. Yah, I saw you say the drive works fine with most disks. If the problem disks are marginal, a drive that's in better condition may be able to read them. * Try other drives, especially old ones in old PCs, maybe even running DOS. The reason for that second suggestion is that, IME, newer PCs (i.e., anything made in the past 5 to 8 years or so) seem to have more trouble with floppies disks. Not surprising to me; they prolly don't have much chance to be tested. I've had some stuff that just wouldn't work in anything made this decade. I actually used to keep an old first-gen Pentium whitebox around just for interoperability reasons. We had some test equipment that used HP's LIF format, and the tools to read LIF disks wouldn't work on newer chipsets. (It also required a clean boot to MS-DOS. That stuff was *old*.) -- Ben
