floppys & diskettes

[Gribouillis]

the other says
that the disk is probably not formatted.

A partition management tool such as gparted could tell you if the disk is formatted. Windows partition manager could probably tell you the same.

[DPaul]

The disk/partition manager does not even mention the A:\ disk (with a diskette inside).
Even this does NOT give an except error. Program finishes without any message.

    try:
        for file in glob.glob('a:\*.*'):
            print(file)
    except Excption as e:
        print(e)

Paul

[Gribouillis]

Again, if you boot on a live linux system, there are plenty of commands to use: lsblk, fdisk, blkid, lshw etc. If there is anything on the diskette, it must be reachable somehow. Don't give up until you have tried every option.

[DPaul]

if you boot on a live linux system

I appreciate the help, but now you are asking for it:
Where do I find a "live unix system" ? The nearest one may be a 100 miles away.
Or is there some smartphone contact app, to locate them?

On second thought, I'm in contact with this engineer at the local uni, maybe he has...
It's a very personal question to ask.
Paul

[Gribouillis]

Where do I find a "live unix system" ?

It is very simple, you buy a USB stick or a DVD and you create a bootable USB stick or DVD with Ubuntu in it. Then you boot your computer on the USB stick and you are running Linux without installing it. It may be a little slow to boot, but it works.

You don't need another computer.

[DPaul]

It is very simple, you buy a USB stick

I suppose I can't use one of these diskettes
Maybe I'm mad enough to give this a try.
Paul

[DPaul]

Maybe I'm mad enough to give this a try.

I did it. Now what?
Paul

[Gribouillis]

I did it. Now what?

You could first try to examine the diskettes with the disks utility to see if it sees any partition on the diskettes. Be careful not to alter the partitions on your hard drives.

You can also install gparted: in a terminal type apt install gparted or sudo apt install gparted, then launch gparted to see if it sees the diskettes and their partitions. Again, be careful, this is a powerful app.

If it doesn't see anything, we'll try to invoke other commands in the terminal.

[DPaul]

You could first try to examine the diskettes with the disks utility

I now have a bootable UBUNTU stick, and will try it out later today or tomorrow.
The purpose is to find out if legacy diskettes have a better chance of being recovered with this tool.

For people interested in this saga, I need to tweak my original statistics about diskette reading succes.
In my original batch I have about 75 diskettes (NOT floppys) of which +/- 30 % proved to be unaccessible.
Yesterday I received a new, unrelated, batch of 10, of which 1 is unaccessible.
BUT: The 75 are mostly with 1 file on the diskette, the series of 10 have 10 or 12 wordperfect files each.
On the 9 diskettes I could access and read files from, many of them caused me to 'skip' file(s) that could not be read.

So with only 1 file on a "faulty diskette", how can I tell what the problem is, the diskette or the file?
Maybe Ubuntu will tell?
Paul

[DPaul]

It would seem that booting from an Ubuntu stick is not a piece of cake.
I tried desktop & laptop.
I have read that pressing "F12" during booting helps: no it doesn't.
I have also read that win 11 recently abolished automatic booting from a:\,
has that something to do with it ?
I will try and find a workaround.
Paul