8" floppy drive. How to identify floppy file system format

[robbo007]

Hi,
I'm managed to get my Mitsubishi M2896-63 8" drive working on a P100 PC. I've found some SS SD floppies and a few DS DD. Whats the best way to identify the file system on the disks and possibly pull the data off? I don't want to format the disks until I can archive the data. Just in case its something important.
Thanks,

 

[ldkraemer]

The best thing to do is use a Flux Image reader to create an Image of each floppy.
There are several that can be used to get a Flux Image of each floppy.
Kryoflux, Supercard Pro, Catweasle, GreaseWeazle, FluxEngine, and Disk Ferret.
There could be another or two, but I can't remember them at this time. The
Kryoflux, GreaseWeazle, and FluxEngine are readily available and pretty easy to use.
The only problem is you will need to connect the Floppy Drive directly to them to
be able to read the floppy.

Another Software package by Dave Dunfield is IMAGEDISK Ver 1.19 and it run on a
DOS Computer. With it you can read all the Tracks, and write an Image file named *.IMD.
Dave has several utilities that allow you to get a Sector Dump (.RAW Image) from the .IMD
file. cpmtools, or cpmtools built with libdsk can then be used to examine the floppy image
and extract the CP/M files.

libdsk by John Elliott has a libdsk utility named dskid that will probe the image file and allow
you to identify the image definition.

If you can get images of the floppies, we likely can get to the files, and extract them.

There are several tutorials about making Preservation floppy's. I'll make you a list.

Attached are screenshots of Dave's Imagedisk.

Larry

 

[Chuck(G)]

Well, just to add--there was a very wide variety of recording methods and filesystems (or lack thereof) in the heyday of the 8" floppy (plural is "floppies"). Unless the disks are from a commonly-encountered system, getting any meaningful data may take some time.

 

[robbo007]

Thanks both for the comments. Thats given me some things to try. I think a few of the floppies are from an IBM AS/400 machine from the 1980's. They look like backups. The other I'll need to investigate more.
Cheers,

 

[Chuck(G)]

I've seen floppies from System/36 (5360) magazines being sold. Never found anything but inventory files (EBCDIC) on any of them.