Covers: Germany, France, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco and Liechtenstein
- Is the price negotiable?
- Yes
- Closest Major City
- Berkshire UK
I have 5x 5.25" floppies I would like to get files from, as a retired hobbyist.
Professional service fees are beyond my budget, but could make some contribution.
These are all from mid to late 1980s.
Brands are InmacPlus70, BASF, 3M, Dysan. Most say high or double density.
Mix of single and double sided.
All were written on msdos machines so hopefully well-known formatting.
The disks contain source-code, text and data, mostly ASCII I am guessing.
I would very much like to have a look at the old code.
As I only have these five disks, this does not warrant setting up my own drive.
Are there any UK VCF members willing to have a go? Will post them.
Thanks!
If you are stuck I could probably do this, though I have not used the machine with the 5.25" floppy in for ages. I am in Manchester, I know there are plenty of folks near you. The TNMOC at Bletchly (so NOT BLETCHLY PARK) can probably do this for a donation.
Thank you for the offer. Will see who else responds. No problem to post to Manchester. I'm curious what OS is your machine running? Meanwhile I'll follow your suggestion and send a note to TNMOC.
I think the machine I am thinking of is windows/3 but I also have a GreaseWeazle that I must admit I have never used , but it is supposed to allow raw data images to be copied.
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The other machine I could try, is perversely an Atari ST which reads and writes IBM format floppies has an external 5.25" drive and an internal Gotek unit which allows a USB stick to contain drive images. There are then tools to extract the files on a modern PC....
If you get no takers, I'd be happy to look at them. Though I'm in the UK Suburb of Australia though, so it would be a long postage and may not be worth it.
Anyone with a greaseweasel and a bottle of Cyclomethicone to reduce the chance of shredding should be able to assist you - Also, you may want a 360 and a 1.2 drive to read depending on the format standard.
Happy to assist with instructions if you want to try it yourself.
David.
Thanks
@cj7hawk I'll keep that in mind. I currently don't have any drives or vintage PC to drive them.
Hello,
I'll be happy to help if I can.
I have a fully operational DOS PC (486) with floppy drives that I use regularly regarding the transfer of data both directions between PCs and my Amstrad CP/M machines. I still have piles of floppy disks that usually work fine for me.
I'm not close to Berkshire, but I've received and sent disks by post without problems.
I cannot guarantee until I've tried one of your disks, but I was happily reading 360k disks from the 80s not so long ago.
I assume that I would send recovered files etc back to you via email, but I could put onto a CD if preferred.
I would not need to make any charge.
Geoff
Bingo
@GeoffB17 that would be grand! Files back by email (zipped) or dropbox will be fine.
Please send me DM with details. Best Regards Ian
Hello,
Just to close this off, may I record that I received the 5 disks OK via mail
The disks appeared on visual inspection to be perfectly fine.
On reading them, they delivered full DIR info.
Subsequently, all files were copied off OK, one disk alone had some trouble with the copy, this turned out to relate to one file which required a number of 'Retry' actions to complete correctly. The problem was likely nothing to do with the age of the disks, more likely a tiny conflict between the way the file was written (on top of old data maybe written on a different machine?) .
A bigger concern was that some 'agency' seems to have looked into my email with attached zip files of the data being returned to OP, detected .EXE files, and taken issue with this. 'agency' using the name: Email Filters' and the domain mailroute.net. Anyone heard of these before.
At least they offered the suggestion that my .ZIP files could be Password Encrypted to avoid the problem and this seemed to work!
Anyway, all done for now.
Geoff
Great work
@GeoffB17, thank you very much for processing these yesterday. I've now got all the files and can continue.
First class service!
A bigger concern was that some 'agency' seems to have looked into my email with attached zip files of the data being returned to OP, detected .EXE files, and taken issue with this. 'agency' using the name: Email Filters' and the domain mailroute.net. Anyone heard of these before.
Yes, it's quite common now for "malicious" email attachments to be blocked, since some users will open anything they receive.
To be fair to 'some users' there isn't always the option, as some email systems will merrily open anything attached. Maybe sometimes there is a setting to turn this off, but is it easy to find and activate. My email comes via a webmail system on my ISP, and I am ALWAYS asks about allowing attachments.
To be fair to 'some users' there isn't always the option, as some email systems will merrily open anything attached. Maybe sometimes there is a setting to turn this off, but is it easy to find and activate. My email comes via a webmail system on my ISP, and I am ALWAYS asks about allowing attachments.
It's not an agency - just a mail filtering service for government/corporate. If you check the recipient's MX records, it's likely they are delivering it directly to the service before it forwards on to them.
A safer way is to upload your data to a cloud server (I like icedrive.net) and pass the link to the file.
A safer way is to upload your data to a cloud server (I like icedrive.net) and pass the link to the file.
Why is hosting your own files so unusual now? I know it's uncommon outside of original internet pioneers, but I'd expect that we have an above average representation of people on the forum who still have original IP allocations dating back 35 or more years, run their own routers, have some file servers online on their home internet service etc.
I know cloud is cheap, but it's a long way from permanent also.
I know cloud is cheap, but it's a long way from permanent also.
When it comes to posting data return, it's exactly what's needed. Secure access to individual files and directories. Unlikely to be scraped by some web crawler. Customer data is not mine to share. If a customer wishes to share, then he can do it himself.
FWIW, I do have my own web domain and site and email, but I prefer some security for customers.
When it comes to posting data return, it's exactly what's needed. Secure access to individual files and directories. Unlikely to be scraped by some web crawler.
FWIW, I do have my own web domain and site and email, but I prefer some security for customers.
OK, so you are running your own server then.
I assume it sits somewhere in your home where it's been for the past few decades? Which even that much I still find isn't very common now.
Though I assume you could write your own web interface if you wanted to, and host whatever files you wanted to share securely where you can control what web crawlers can and can't access.
