this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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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?
It works on a different level than a lot of tools. You need an actual floppy drive to hook it to, but it records the raw flux data on the disc. That's the layer "below" a filesystem.
There are then tools that will convert the flux image into a filesystem that can be mounted or modified with disc image editing tools.
This thing sounds "right up my ally". When I can justify the purchase...
I’m not sure why the data recovery software isn’t working given that you can see it with a hex editor. I mean, it’s been 35 years and change since I fired up Norton Utilities, but it sounds like the data should be recoverable as long as it hasn’t been overwritten, and even then it should be partially recoverable.
Whether a partial recovery is useful depends entirely on the type of file. The zip file might be dead but there might be a recovery path there, too.
It’s not a lot of money to give it a shot, but maybe also talk to the linux users group at your closest university or posting to communities that are populated by people who get into the low level stuff. If it’s for a system that was popular at the time (Apple, Amiga, some types of PCs), you might be able to find a retro computing hobbyist community directly. We’d do stuff like that in exchange for beer when I was in college.
I just recovered an entire 6tb drive that was accidentally formatted using HDDSuperClone from a linuxlive USB.
Pretty much make the live usb and boot into Linux. Open "DMDE" to view the files on the formatted USB and copy it to another drive.
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.
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
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
Give testdisk a run. I've had pretty good luck with it and it's FOSS