Software-based floppy disc data separator

On 18 Jun 2010 at 17:00, Fred Cisin wrote: I agree with Fred--format varieties number in the thousands. There are some that I haven't managed to crack yet (lack of Rosetta stone mostly). For example, how about extracting documents in Hebrew from a Compugraphic typesetter floppy? Today I got a box of floppies in that someone had obviously simply gleaned from the back corner of their closet. A mix of 5.25 and 3.5; most are PC-based (DOS/Win), but there 400K and 800K Mac floppies in their as well as the 1.44MB type--one or two I can't quite identify yet. The 5.25" variety is a mix of densities from PC and various CP/M systems. But at least they were from personal computers--that makes them easy. What no one realizes is that "computers" in the sense of "personal computers" are just the tip of the iceberg. While they may represent the bulk of floppies in existence, they don't represent the variety of variations in filesystems, encodings or layouts. Most of the details of those dedicated systems (say, from someone's PBX) remain unknown to the current day. There are some people lurking who have knowledge of certain file formats (e.g. embroidery machines) who can assist in translating the data to something meaningful. But often, the best you can get is "this is what the machine does when you feed it this diskette". What complicates things even more is that very often, the equipment that created these things no longer exists in any form. You've got a disk and maybe, if you're very lucky, a photo of the system or a users' manual. If anyone wants to try their hand at it, I can send a time-domain (i.e. Catweasel) sample of a Lanier 32-sector M2FM (as best I can determine it) WP disk. You have only to figure out the character set, file system, floppy encoding and file format... --Chuck