retrocomputing

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Two men exonerated after 30 years in prison by retrocomputing enthusiasts and the Bloop Museum, by extracting data from a damaged floppy disc. (www.patreon.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (8 children)

The price for that GREASEWEAZLE is really good, around just 25 euro! Anyone ever tried it? I have two floppies that have sentimental value for me. One is from elementary school, I wanted to do a backup five years ago with an USB drive and fucking Windows Defender "cleaned" a boot virus by quick formatting the drive. The USB drive ignored the status of the "read only" tab and allowed that. I wasn't able to recover the data with any data recovery software (it shows empty because the MBR has gone) but the data is there, visible with an hex editor from a full image

The other is from middle school but there's a zip file that I can't copy because of a damaged sector. I would still be pointless, right?

[–] khannie 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Have you tried photorec on them? The deep dive tool in the suite that I can't remember the name of will ignore the missing MBR and just look for file markers in the raw data. I've only ever used it on Linux but there is a Windows version too.

You can run it ona copy of the image to protect the original

I also vaguely recall a tool called zipfix for broken zip files that will allow you to extract all but the broken parts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I tried but it can't find anything, probably because of signatures. It's just some text files (no header) and that could be found with the hex editor but then there's an executable inside to interpret them. Being that old I don't remember what program is that.

Maybe I should find that image and post here if someone has it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You could creating an image of the drive under Linux, using dd. Then the recovery could be attempted on the image (assuming it does not contain sensitive data and can be shared).

For your information, in case your curious, a similar interface (that I use) is: https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/building.html

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