Greetings,
I'm in possession of a reasonably complete set of SVR3 media (and
associated drivers, diagnostics, etc.) for the AT&T 3B2 on 5.25" QD
floppies. Sadly, I no longer have any 3B2 hardware, but with luck one
day I may change that.
I had planned on imaging and preserving these disks for my own use, if
nothing else. But it occurs to me that I don't know how rare they
might be, and I might do harm by attempting to read them in an EBay'ed
PC floppy drive (albeit with cleaned heads).
Is this material sufficiently preserved that I don't need to worry
about damaging my copies? I didn't see any 3B2 related bits on
bitsavers and a cursory google search didn't turn up much.
I have a few disks with duplicate contents, so I risked a test run
with Unix dd and got a sane-looking complete image with no I/O errors,
and no material shedding off the floppy that I could see. I still
need to see if the bits are good at a higher level (I think they are
formatted as "S5" filesystems, not sure). But I'd have no problem
shipping the floppies to a respected member of the community who does
this kind of thing all the time (e.g. bitsavers), if it would be worth
their time.
thanks,
-Andy