UNIX floppy (ext2?) to WinXP Pro (NTFS).... easy way?

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OSUguy98

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2006
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At work, we're reorganizing our storage areas, elminating what we can, keeping all we need, shrinking whatever we can.....

Apparently, 10-15+ years ago, all of our CAD machines were UNIX based and the way they backed up their drawings were 3.5 floppies (and maybe some 5 1/4 floppies, though we haven't found those.... yet....)

So my bosses want to back all of those disks and such up onto a harddrive and then a few CDs... I have no clue as to the number of disks we'd be backing up, but I'm sure this will be a "fun" job for the summer help lol

So my question to you...... How do you get the data from a presummed ext2 floppy disk, and copy it onto an NTFS partition? As of right now, I'm not sure that "set up a free-distro linux box and then mount a samba partition" is a feasible option (state work, red tape/etc/etc/etc/etc) Any other options?

I have a little bit of a background in Linux (little bit = playing around with Red Hat in the past.... 6.0, 7.2, I think)....

Thanks in advance!


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

 
What Unix OS were the machines running? I'd venture they were probably HP-UX, or IRIX.
 
Ubuntu live CD? I think your going to have to use some sort of linux live cd to do that..
 
As for the flavor of UNIX, I have no clue... I've asked everyone in the office and they've all looked at me and said "umm... there are different versions?" or "Just UNIX is all I remember"

one clue though, They were INTERGRAPH machines, and from some of the disc we've found, they acted like INTERGRAPH had it's on OS.... what it was based off of is anyone's guess...

I may try a Live CD, I'm not sure how nicely they would play with our network/etc... worse comes to worse, I may just pester the IT guy, maybe he can figure it out....

I did find this: http://www.fs-driver.org/

but I'm still playing around with it.... haven't figured out how to use it yet

-----Update..... I tried the above program, but it said that it didn't recognize the filesystem... so I don't know what kind of file system it is?


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

 
Okay, another update..... I found this wikipedia entry....... CLIX? does that sound familiar to anyone??


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

 
First off, if they were UNIX machines then the filesystem is definitely not going to be ext2 ;) (ext2 was written specifically for linux by linus torvalds) It could be a number of things, probably either MINIX filesystem or UFS. Anyway, just bust out a linux box, mount the floppies (whatever partition type they are linux will be able to do it, might take a kernel reconfigure but that's it) and copy the data to an NTFS or FAT32 flash drive. Then you're good to go.
 
Live CD and then copy onto USB media sounds like the way to go here - assuming you can get Linux to read the media at all.

Your bigger problem is that, after several years, there's a good chance that your flopies may be unreadable or corrupted.
 
Is there any way to do this without converting a box to linux?

my recommendation to them has been just to chuck the disks, but they wanted to see if they could save the info first..... so spending money on another PC or converting an existing one to linux wouldn't be the best option (it's a state job, and money is tight enough as it is).... I'll look into a liveCD of some kind, but are there any out there that will recognize old UNIX partitions? or CLIX (assuming that they could be different)?


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Try FreeSBIE http://www.freesbie.org/ . If it was a old UNIX system of that era, I'd bet it was using the FFS file system, I'm sure Linux could read it, but a BSD variant is guaranteed to be able to read any old FS, FFS, or UFS system.
 
Thanks for the help guys.... I'll give that Live CD a try... but meanwhile, is there any windows-based solution to this?


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OSUguy98 said:
Thanks for the help guys.... I'll give that Live CD a try... but meanwhile, is there any windows-based solution to this?


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

Click to expand...


A quick google search reveals this though I've never tried it, and it doesn't say anything about floppies though the principal is the same.

 
here i thought floppies were all fat or fat32 due to their small size...shows what i know. it has been a long time since i touched unix (albeit it was sco). could the floppies be fat?
 
XP can recognize FAT... these disk just say "This disk isn't formatted. Would you like to?" when you try to access it in XP...


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well then, im out of ideas...

sorry i cant be of more help to you. :(
 
Well, the first assumption here is that these floppys were written on PC-compatible drives? Anyhow, you could just image them all to file and hope that you're not around when they need something off them :-p

(With a modern linux you'd just put the floppy in and do a '# cp /dev/fd0 suitablefilename.img' <chug, chug, chug> NEXT! (or 'man dd')

I'm sure there are floppy imaging software for windows too (in fact, I know there is), I just can' be bothered to look up a name.
 
I asked my boss about them yesterday afternoon, and mentioned some of the solutions proposed here, and he said "well... I kinda think we should just put them back on the shelf and forget they exist...." so maybe I won't have to worry about this problem.... We do have paper and/or mylar copies of everything that's on those disks, but there are times when a microstation drawing would come in handy....

from a repair work standpoint (someone hits a bridge beam, damages it), redrawing steel details (in a hurry) could be rather time consuming and/or full of errors....

Oh well, I'll tinker with it a little here and there.... If I can get it to work somehow, then maybe the summer girl next year can copy these floppies onto a server/tape backup/etc....

Thanks for all the help guys


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

 
You could always try using winimage or winhex and save raw images of the floppies to your hard drive. At least you would have a copy of the data and not worry about the floppies anymore. Then later you could boot a live linux CD and do a batch mount/copy of all the files on the images to a hard drive.
 
I second the "backup first" idea. Next, try this:
cat /dev/fd0 | file -
from a bootable Linux disk (Knoppix, et al), and see what it says. For example, on my machine (checking a hard drive, not a floppy, sorry - I don't have a machine with a floppy around), I get:
Code: 
# file - < /dev/sda1
/dev/stdin: x86 boot sector, code offset 0x48, OEM-ID "NTFS    ", sectors/cluster 8, reserved sectors 0, Media descriptor 0xf8, heads 64, hidden sectors 32, dos < 4.0 BootSector (0x80)

 
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