[Novalug] USB floppy?

Nick Danger nick@hackermonkey.com
Mon Apr 23 20:00:01 EDT 2012


Anyone used those USB floppy drives with Linux? My desktop doesn't even 
have a 3.5" anymore, and what I grabbed from the scrap pile at work 
doesn't really seem to work... Curious if the USB ones work at all, or 
how well. Long story below (for anyone that cares to read it)

My sister handed me her "backups" of pictures/data for her dog 
carting/breeding. It was a pile of Zip100's and some 3.5" floppies. She 
also included a parallel port zip which I spent a bit of time trying to 
make work under linux and was unsuccessful before I quickly threw 
together an XP box to read them. It was still error ridden, but I got 
some data. The wife said she had a USB Zip250 @ work. That worked 
fantastically, and running right now on my Fedora 16 box, pulling much 
more data. Still some corruption on the disks but one bad file out of 
100 is better then 10-15 bad files out of 100 I was getting before.

Now onto the floppies. Yeah, no kidding. MSDos5 floppies. Frys has a USB 
3.5" floppy drive for all of $20. Not a huge investment to get her old 
data off if she really wants it. Neither my desktop nor laptop have a 
3.5" drive anymore. But, I don't want to find out I have as much luck 
with that as I did with the old parallel port zip. (I can't even find 
the ppa driver anymore, does it even exist in the kernel?!)

I am going to burn this all on DVD for her, with the instruction that 
every time she gets a new machine, we upgrade her 'backups' to whatever 
goes with her new machine. Problem was she put the zip+backups in the 
closet and has been through 3 machines since she made these. And the 
latest workstation she has doesn't have a parallel port. I guess that 
has gone the way of the 3.5" floppy :-)

Nick



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