💾 Archived View for dece.space › notes › 20230305-diskette-quest.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:25:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
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(disquestte?)
My friend caiu (🦆) found a floppy drive with her name written on it in her dad's stuff. She had no idea what was on it and gave it to me with a smile. Could I get what's on it? What 1.44MB of mysteries can it hold? I love these kind of challenges and since my laundry room is currently the storage room for our hackerspace's stuff, I had a lot of parts to try to read it, and of course it was out of the question to buy a fancy USB floppy disk drive, so this note is about how I got the files back.
Alright so I found three floppy disk drives, all covered in dust. First issue: they all have IDE ports only, and I don't recognise the power supply port: turns out it's actually a dedicated floppy port that modern PSUs don't have anymore. I don't have IDE-to-something converters so I found the only motherboard in our stuff that have IDE ports and decided to build a computer with it. Of course it has no RAM nor CPU nor anything, but my accomplice Kholah found in his own mess a matching CPU, an Intel Pentium 4 with bent pins — yeah since we got kicked out of our place in Aubervilliers last October, we all have our own pile of electronics cluttering our homes — and I had the antistatic bag holding all our RAM bars (20 of them maybe), and only one had the matching format, whew! 256MB. The motherboard has no video output I can use so I plug a stupid video card with a VGA output and it can use my TV as display. I also have no power button so I'm just shorting it manually using cables and a breadboard. I manage to straighten the CPU pins and successfully plug it. Let's boot it!
But it doesn't. The PSU makes a really tired noise and nothing shows up. Once I got to see some hardware listing for a few seconds and it went black. Maybe this PSU was dying, maybe the CPU was heating way too quickly without a heat sink, I wasn't sure so I replaced the PSU and found a giant sink with crusty thermal paste, removed the obviously inadequate sink base on the motherboard and simply placed it on the CPU, no screws. Y-yeah, low-tech! At this point I was trying to plug my floppy disk drives but the motherboard was beeping like crazy like it was shorted! What?! Oh it was actually shorted: don't place a whole motherboard directly on a metal PC case.
Now the computer boots, but of course it can't read my USB3 key with Debian, so I burn a Xubuntu 10.04 live CD and use my uhm portable DVD drive to boot from it. It struggles to boot but after a few attempts I get to the live system. As there is only two USB ports and one is taken by the DVD drive, I have to use small USB to PS/2 adapters to have both keyboard and mouse (but the mouse doesn't work anyway).
(how to reuse a laptop DVD drive)
Once Xubuntu is up it's really easy to list and extract the files, you just have plug your diskette, mount /dev/fd0 (fd for floppy drive), and… wait why is it so hard to push the diskette inside this drive? Oh there are diskette remnants in there, I should clean that first! OK, now that the files can be accessed, how to get them out of the computer? I don't have compatible USB drives, but I have a network cable, aha! You have to tweak your sources.list to access the old repositories and download curl so I can try to POST the files to an HTTPS file sharing service. It fails because the server refuses my poor TLS settings! I enable plain HTTP on the server just during transfer… And we're good! 🙌
A diskette piece initially stuck in the drive (89K)
X crashed a long time ago and I did everything in tty, getting constantly flooded with video errors and now out-of-memory issues were threatening every action, so it was time to shut it down.
Oh and what were the recovered files? That's secret ;)
(I have no idea what I recovered, what even is a .PAL file?)
