Hello all. Several weeks ago, I posted (off-topic) here asking if anyone had a preferred or suggested Linux distro that would allow me to read, open, copy and offload data from old 3.5 floppy disks. My Windows XP machines kept insisting that the Win98 disks I was trying to open were unreadable and asking would I like to reformat them? I was certain there was an incompatibility between reading FAT and NTFS file formats, while the general consensus here was that the material on the disks was degraded and too far gone to be readable, even after I tried swapping floppy drives to see if one worked better than the other.
I'm writing again tonight to happily proclaim that a copy of "ArtistX" - a multimedia distro based on Ubuntu and running on ten-year-old Dell hardware - effortlessly uncorked each and every disk in my collection: two containing dozens of original articles I wrote for Radio World in the 1990s. Not only that, with a little messing with FSTAB, I also got the machine to mount and read a parallel-port ZIP 100 drive, recovering material containing my wife's life history off half-dozen old ZIP 100 disks. Everything is now backed up to DVDs and a USB Flash drive, all to be recopied onto the next popular storage format that comes along. Being able to recover all this material was very important and meaningful to me. The Penguin pulls it off again. -Al P. _______________________________________________ Rivendell-dev mailing list [email protected] http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
