Recovering data from decades old floppy disks

For the longest time, I’ve had a stack of old 3.5” floppy disks. At some point in the past years, I thought it would be fun to see what’s on them.

But how do you do that on a modern PC? I hadn’t had an actual floppy drive for the longest time.

There are two options:

1. Get a USB floppy drive (cheap, easy)
2. Get a floppy controller and a “proper” floppy drive

I tried them both, mainly because I only learned about the advantages of #2 later.

USB floppy drives

You can get a USB-powered floppy drive for fairly cheap. As a USB peripheral, it “just works” - plug it in, and it shows up as a USB storage device. You can even use them on Android phones via a USB OTG cable. Along with plugging in a mouse to the phone, it’s something you can amuse yourself with for an hour.

There’s just one problem with USB floppy drives: Turns out they actually aren’t very good at reading disks that might have degraded, which was a problem with many of the disks I have. Although a few of the disks read just fine with the USB floppy drive, many of them did not.

Floppy controllers

The solution to reading degraded disks is getting a floppy controller, like a Greaseweazle. I ordered one from AmigaStore, in a handy 3D printed case. You also need a floppy drive, some way to power it, and an old school Parallel ATA cable. I had both a drive and a suitable data cable, since I still have some of my old PC’s sitting around. For the power cable, I was able to use a power connector from a kit that converts PATA hard drives into USB compatibles.

Once you have all your data recovery paraphernalia, you can grab the gw command line tool and a floppy disk image tool, such as HxC. The final obstacle is figuring out the correct invocation for gw, which in case of imaging IBM PC 3.5” 1.44 MB disks is gw read outputfile.img --format ibm.1440 After you run the command, gw produces an image file of the disk contents. You can then open the image using HxC, and extract any files of interest.

Greaseweazle has some other more advanced usages available as well. It can read the raw magnetic flux from the disk, which can - at least in theory - be used to recover data that would otherwise be unreadable. I did not have much luck with this though.

Results

The floppy drive that I wanted to use with Greaseweazle made a concerning noise when I picked it up: It really sounded like something was completely loose inside it. I tried reading a disk I didn’t care much for first just to be safe (which you probably should do regardless of scary noises from the drive, there can be hidden problems in the drives too).

Much to my surprise, Greaseweazle read nearly every disk without problems, or at least enough to give me an idea what the files on the disk were. The main exceptions were a couple of shovelware software disks, which all refused to read. They must’ve really used the cheapest possible disk stock for those back in the day.

I found exciting things from the floppies, such as an essay on Chinese cuisine I had written when I was 13, and possibly the first ever thing I ever downloaded from the internet - a Cyrix patch for Tommi Mäkinen International Rally Championships, which we had to go to the library to download because we didn’t have internet at home at the time.

If you have a stack of old floppies and you’re not sure what’s on them, consider this the sign to check them out. Time is not friendly to them no matter how well stored.

A good guide to get started can be found here: https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/