Hi

About 6 years ago, I made an archive of my work on a different machine
(using zipsplit IIRC) on a set of floppies. Two years ago, I made an
attempt to extract this data and found that one of the floppies was damaged
and I could not reconstruct the whole archive. I did not know more about
working with damaged media, and since I was short on time, I returned the
floppies to the storage and forgot about it.

I just remembered that incident yesterday. Is there a tool that I can use
to accomplish the task of reconstructing as much of the archive as is
possible technically ?

Thanks.

In comp.os.linux.misc Madhusudan Singh <spammers-go-here@spam.invalid> wrote:
: Hi

: About 6 years ago, I made an archive of my work on a different machine
: (using zipsplit IIRC) on a set of floppies. Two years ago, I made an
: attempt to extract this data and found that one of the floppies was damaged
: and I could not reconstruct the whole archive. I did not know more about
: working with damaged media, and since I was short on time, I returned the
: floppies to the storage and forgot about it.

: I just remembered that incident yesterday. Is there a tool that I can use
: to accomplish the task of reconstructing as much of the archive as is
: possible technically ?

With a damaged floppy I'd be VERY careful about even trying to read it.
If the data is important enough, a data recovery service is your best bet.
They will have the drives and expertise needed.

If you don't care that much about the best way to proceed would be
a raw copy as best as you can to a disk image and then mess with
that image rather than the original floppy.

Stan
--
Stan Bischof ("stan" at the below domain)
www.worldbadminton.com

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 12:24:34 -0500, Madhusudan Singh staggered into the
Black Sun and said:
> Two years ago, I made an attempt to extract this data and found that
> one of the floppies was damaged and I could not reconstruct the whole
> archive. Is there a tool that I can use to accomplish the task of
> reconstructing as much of the archive as is possible technically ?

The thing that actually works best for damaged FAT12 floppies IME is
SCANDISK.EXE. If these floppies were created without a filesystem, and
all they contained was compressed data, you're basically screwed.
Destroying one bit (or several bits, or 512-byte blocks) from the middle
of a zip/bzip2/gzip file will make huge portions of the data unreadable
for obvious reasons. I suppose you could use dd_rescue to make images
of the floppy disks, recreate the entire zip file with cat, then try
"zip -FF" on the file, but I wouldn't expect to recover much from that.

Floppies have *SUCKED* as archival media ever since the manufacturers
started making cheap disks in the mid-1990s.

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / Hire me!
-----------------------------/ http://crow202.dyndns.org/~mhgraham/resume

Madhusudan Singh wrote :

> I just remembered that incident yesterday. Is there a tool that I can use
> to accomplish the task of reconstructing as much of the archive as is
> possible technically ?

Never heard of zipsplit and the rest of my message is based on the guess
that it creates a zip file split into smaller parts.

Back in my DOS days the pkzip package came with a little utility named
pkzipfix and this utility has saved quite a few of my corrupted zip
files. Actully it has never let me down.

So I would do this. Copy the files to your harddrive and join them using
cat and then bring the resulting file to a DOS computer and then try if
pkzipfix can restore the zip file.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

Thomas Overgaard wrote:

>
> Madhusudan Singh wrote :
>
>> I just remembered that incident yesterday. Is there a tool that I can
>> use
>> to accomplish the task of reconstructing as much of the archive as is
>> possible technically ?
>
> Never heard of zipsplit and the rest of my message is based on the guess
> that it creates a zip file split into smaller parts.
>
> Back in my DOS days the pkzip package came with a little utility named
> pkzipfix and this utility has saved quite a few of my corrupted zip
> files. Actully it has never let me down.
>
> So I would do this. Copy the files to your harddrive and join them using
> cat and then bring the resulting file to a DOS computer and then try if
> pkzipfix can restore the zip file.

Good advice, except that one of the split up parts cannot be copied fully

Madhusudan Singh wrote :

> Good advice, except that one of the split up parts cannot be copied fully

I would give a try anyway. I once managed to restore a zip file from a
seriously damaged CD (with a lot of big scratches) using pkzipfix.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

In article <31orjuF3cjfk8U2@individual.net>,
Madhusudan Singh <spammers-go-here@spam.invalid> wrote:

> About 6 years ago, I made an archive of my work on a different machine
>(using zipsplit IIRC) on a set of floppies. Two years ago, I made an
>attempt to extract this data and found that one of the floppies was damaged
>and I could not reconstruct the whole archive.

That's why, back when I used to use floppies for backing up the programs
I wrote, I made sure to maintain two copies. It doubled the pain of
doing backups, but it did pretty much save my life.

When I got my first CD writer and it came time to transfer all the stuff
to CD, I found bad sectors on both copies of one disk. Luckily, they
were in different files. So I was able to reconstruct a working copy of
all the files on that disk.

Madhusudan Singh wrote:
> Good advice, except that one of the split up parts cannot be copied fully

To get past this use dd to copy what you can of the offending disk onto
a hard disk (check dd's options). Then use dd to copy back onto a fresh
disk. This way you will lose data but pkzipfix might be able to work then.

Richard