[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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