At a computer centre usually all components should be still available to get a working setup to read the mostly DOS formatted disks (MFM format).Ĩ” floppy disks were generally out of use by the beginning/mid 1990s and were not part of the office or personal computers when they became commonly used. Thus, it is still possible to find systems which feature a 3.5” drive and systems which have at least a floppy controller present.
#Floppy disk archive Pc
5.25” and 3.5” PC formatted disks were quite common and widely used. While extracting data from more recent 5.25” and 3.5” floppy disks which were used later on in the university, the case for 8” is more complicated. Of course, this assumption might be totally wrong. The first entry indicates a large data file of 1188 bytes, maybe a database file. H is the drive type (9895A), 8 the controller select code, 0 the drive address, 1 the unit address. This having determined is from a Hewlett-Packard CAT command, which is interpreted as probably from an HP 9845/35 series. Because of the number of HP disks in the set it was presumed that an HP system could have been used and further investigation into the part numbers was tried. Inquiries in the clinic only brought up the hint, that they introduced office writers (electronic IBM trypewriters) and later CPM machines both featuring 8″ drives. Some sheets of papers put into the paper sleeves of the floppies seem to indicate (looks like head and track information) that no filesystem was used at all. A selection of the 8” floppy disks from different vendors with scant metadata BASF and HP manufactured a couple of disks) do not provide any information on the (operating) system used to create them or on the formatting. The floppy labels of the various brands (e.g. The information about them is rather scant. The floppies in question are dating from the early/mid 1980s. The hand-over procedure did not generate much valuable information, but just a stack of those disks with some additional paper stuck in the disk sleeves.
#Floppy disk archive archive
This time we were challenged at the very beginning of the workflow: The university archive in Freiburg recently received a set of 8” floppy disks which might contain interesting case and research data. The hardware part – reading the disks and producing images from them – was handled by the archives and the Freiburg team joined at a later stage after the floppy images were created and the content easily accessible for further scrutiny. It was a cooperation with The Archives NZ being asked to identify the content of 5.25” disks. A while ago the digital preservation team of the professorship in communication systems got involved in Digital Archaeology and Forensics of some old floppy disks of unknown origin.
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