Forensics: Recovering a 12-year old floppy disk with DD

“.. True story. Earlier this year I was handed a 12-year old floppy disk loaded with bad sectors and unmountable due to a missing/corrupted partition table. A lost cause? Nope. DD can still image the raw media, skipping unreadable sectors and padding the output file with zeros to keep file structures intact wherever possible.

I booted up a Helix Live CD and ran:
dcfldd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img bs=4k conv=noerror,sync

After much grinding and hissing, DD finished with a fully intact 1.4MB floppy disk image. Almost made me want to scour through my old floppy collection. Almost ..”

Grep8000.blogspot.com, 9 September 2009
http://grep8000.blogspot.com/2009/09/forensic-recovering-12-year-old-floppy.html – last access 30 September 2010 (Full Article )

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September 30, 2010 | Categories: dcfldd, Floppy Disk, Floppy Disks, Helix, News, Software | Tags: Computer Forensics, dcfldd, Digital Forensics, Helix | Comments Off on Forensics: Recovering a 12-year old floppy disk with DD