reading legacy floppy disks

[Allen Taylor]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 09:28:12PM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> Dave Mason wrote:
> > I have a bunch of 7" (yes, 7-inch) double-sided, high density (something
> > over 1MB per disk) floppies that I want to try to read.  I really just
> > want a dump onto a CD.  I can decode the format (UCSD P-System) and extract the
> > data.  These were probably last used 20 years ago, but have been stored
> > fairly carefully.  I don't have much of a budget for this, but I would
> > really like to read them, if possible.
> > 
> > Any ideas, offers, or recommendations much appreciated!
> 
> I believe you mean 8 inch floppies.  You'd have to find someone with an
> 8 inch floppy drive and a system that can understand the format use.
> Also, are they hard or soft sectored?  Hard sectored disks have several
> holes around the hub and soft sectored only one.  They are not compatible.

I actually have an 8" drive somewhere in the mountain of boxes in my
basement but the CP/M system that I used it on is long gone. Since I
just moved last week, my chances of finding it are slim at the moment.
As others have noted, odds of reading old magnetic media go down
significantly somewhere in the 5 to 10 year range.

Good Luck,

Allen
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