Recovering older data from Floppies

Floppy disks image from wikipedia

Recovering data from media is a non-trivial task. There is no magic — we need device (hardware) for reading the media.

• We can find some of older Pentium machines (II, III, IV) with 5.25, 3.5 floppy drives
• Most of them have windows 98/xp working on them
• We can mount the Medias and retrieve data (files) directly
• write them to CDs or Pen drives or send emails and retrieve in new machines

If we cannot find older machines,

• we can get external floppy disks for 3.5 in retail shops (at least in ebay/Amazon websites).

Also, there are various vendors doing this recovery of bits from older Medias as paid service. They can recover from 5.25", 3.5" floppy disks and older zip-drives (http://floppydisk.com).

FAT12 File System:

Once we have the bit stream, we need to retrieve the actual data from it.

• Most of the floppies use the FAT file system.
• A floppy disk has the same structures as a single hard disk volume.
• Almost all the floppy disks are formatted in the FAT12 version of the FAT file system.
• It uses a 12-bit binary number to hold the cluster number.
• A FAT12 formatted volume can hold a maximum of 4,086 clusters, which is 2¹² minus a few values (for reserved values to be used in the FAT).
• FAT12 is therefore most suitable for very small volumes, and is used on floppy disks and hard disk partitions smaller than 16 MB.
• We can mount the raw floppy image data with the help of
• some virtualization in Bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/loop-device-usage.html) or
• some tools in windows like Virtual Floppy Drive (http://vfd.sourceforge.net/) and retrieve the data (files) from them