Data On Floppy 'A' Discs

Oblivion

Not so much a case of 'Back to the future' as 'Forward to the past'.


My wife was clearing out a cupboard today and came across some of my old floppy discs, some of which date back to when we bought our very first home computer ... an Amstrad 386


One lot of 40 x 720k discs are labelled by me ALT386sx HDB'C' so these are clearly a complete backup of the Amstrad's hard disc. I still have a USB floppy A drive so had a look at a few and they are readable but each one has 2 files with titles like Backup.001 and Control.001 , so I assume these were made using Windows (possibly 3.1 ???) backup programme.


Another lot, possibly from a later computer I have labelled along the lines of 'Backup C:\Pictures A: /S' which looks like a DOS command? Each one has a single file called for example CC30729I.001


Is there any easy and 'dirty' way that I can recover and have a look at the contents of these old backup files on my Windows 7 Ultimate PC?

WTFH

First, you need to find the last disk in each set. From memory that was the one which had the extract software on it.

Alternatively, I'm talking guff and you need to do this:
http://www.lancelhoff.com/how-to-open-001-files/

bluesnake

WTFH wrote: »

Alternatively, I'm talking guff and you need to do this:
http://www.lancelhoff.com/how-to-open-001-files/

Please do not do the above, as it is a method used to join split files, as the methodology looks the same, but is very different.

I think you had to make a dos boot disk and copy the backup.exe command on to the boot disk, or use the original system disks. Many people, if extra space provided, copied the backup software to the last disk. Think the software asked for the last disk first, so you must have all the disks from the set. I can not remember any more if the command was dos version dependant or not. FreeDos was backward compatible - allegedly. dos 3x-5.x use BACKUP and CONTROL files. Think floppy DOS only recognised fat12 to fat 16? Fat32 was part of win 95 era

I doubt these would work any more due to most of them being dos version specific http://manmrk.net/tutorials/DOS/msdos.htm

paddyrg

PKZip used to span discs, suspect this is what's happened here. Try 7z, it's pretty flexible :-)

bluesnake

think the giveaway are words Backup and Control = usually dos backup. True, nothing to loose trying 7zip, but that control file did contain the name, attributes, date/time stamp and size

esuhl

Looks like you'll need to use the DOS "restore" command.

It doesn't seem to work in the command prompt in Windows 7, so I think you might need to find a DOS emulator (or install an old copy of MS-DOS in a virtual machine) to access that command...?

https://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/backup.html
http://www.computerhope.com/backup.htm

S0litaire

First things first! Image ALL the floppies!!

Their is no telling what havoc a slipped finger when entering a command can do to a spanned set of backups on old tech like floppy disks! ^_~ and it's 1000 times quicker to use images to recover data from than waiting on a floppy drive to spin up and replacing each disk...

http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm

I used this YEARS ago to image all 50+ floppy's from my original win3.1/ Win95 installs (with office install floppies and Flight "what ever version it was at the time") So i could burn them all onto a CD for safe keeping.

I lost the CD a few months later but still had the floppies up till i had a clean out in 2005 >_<

poppellerant

Does as S0litaire says, make an image of all the disks first - not only will this provide you with a backup of the disks, you should be able to access the images using VirtualBox (a virtual machine). Also make a copy of these images - one for playing about with on the virtual machine and one as a read-only backup.

After making your images, I would be tempted to install DOS 6.22 (or whatever software was used to create the backup) on a virtual machine and tinker at will with the floppy images. I seem to remember the backup software for MS-DOS was called something like msbackup.

esuhl

poppellerant wrote: »

After making your images, I would be tempted to install DOS 6.22 (or whatever software was used to create the backup) on a virtual machine and tinker at will with the floppy images. I seem to remember the backup software for MS-DOS was called something like msbackup.

Since the files are from a 386, I think that the backup program would just be called "backup". From MS-DOS 6.0 onwards, it was "msbackup".

http://www.computerhope.com/backup.htm
http://www.computerhope.com/msbackup.htm