From: Bruce-Robert Pocock 
Reply-To: Fidonet Classic_Computer Echo 

On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 06:07 +0930, Bob Ackley wrote:
> Replying to a message of Sam Alexander to All:
>  SA> I still have stacks of floppies (5.25") from my days of
hacking around
>  SA> on  the Tandy Color Computer 2 and 3, and I was wondering if there's
>  SA> an app for  Linux that'll read these old floppies.  Just curious ..
> 
> The problem might be hooking up a 5.25" drive to a Linux box.  AFAIK, if
> the disks are DOS (FAT) format Linux can read them, there are several
> commands that start with the letter 'm' that handle DOS formatted floppies.

If they're FAT12 (DOS) formatted, you can access them without the old
"mtools" utilities, just insert the disc and mount it (e.g. double-click
the floppy drive icon in your file manager). You might want to cover the
"write-protect" notch with some electrical tape, just in case.

If they use unusual disc geometry but are otherwise FAT12 discs (this is
usually 8" not 5.25") you can create special "tuned"
floppy disc device
files in /dev to mount them. For example, "/dev/fd0D360" forces the
system to interpret the disc in "fd0" as a double-density 360k disc,
IIRC.

If they're not FAT discs at all, you might instead need to use the "dd"
utility to copy their contents. (This is still geometry-specific.) For
example, to copy a 160k floppy disc made up of 320 512-byte blocks in
device "fd0":

dd if=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=320 of=~/CoCo-disc-1.img
("man dd" for details)

If you're after text content, you may be able to extract it (if you're
lucky) with "strings CoCo-disc-1.img". At worst, the .img file should
open in any emulator (possibly after renaming it).

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