3 Mar
2004
3 Mar
'04
3:49 a.m.
Yesterday my boss came to me and handed me a stack of 3 1/2 inch floppy
disks and asked me to get the data off them.
Ahh, the perils of being the geekiest person in your orginazation! :)
Anyway, all he could tell me is that they were from a Brother word
processor. It didn't have a model number and no serial port.
One of the disks is a system disk ("Spreadsheet, punctualtion alert and
data storage disk for Brother Word Processor version <1.0>") and is
dated 1991.
I tried the disk in my DOS 6.22 PC, no deal.
Then I tried cw2dmk (thanks Tim!) and my Catweasel, but I guess the
format isn't close enough to IBM 370 (FM) or IBM 34 (MFM) formats to be
useful.
Does anyone know of a tool I can use to read these disks?
Barring that: does anybody know what format the disk is using? I'm not
past modifying cw2dmk to read it, but I would hope not to have to
reverse engineer the "on disk" format.
Thanks!
--
tim lindner
tlindner(a)ix.netcom.com
3 Mar
3 Mar
10:51 a.m.
On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, tim lindner wrote:
Anyway, all he could tell me is that they were from a
Brother word
processor. It didn't have a model number and no serial port.
I'm not sure about your particular case, but I've seen rather a lot of
word processors with 3.5" double density floppy drives, and folks tending
to use high density floppies in them. Works just fine, of course, but the
result is a DD floppy that has a HD sense hole.
I tried the disk in my DOS 6.22 PC, no deal.
If I'm right about the above.... the PC drive will see the HD hole and
try (and fail) to read the disk as HD. If you wrap a bit of tape or a
post-it around the HD hole, the PC drive should see it properly as DD.
Most of these machines (that I've seen, anyway) seem to use FAT12, so that
DOS machine should be about to read them just fine.
Good luck.
--Ian
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