Need help pulling ASCII off of an unmountable disk.
 

I've got a disk I made with an old Mac. I've got a lot of stuff on it that I want. Unfortunately, I can't mount it. I know Linux will read the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, but it won't read this disk. I've also got two Windows programs that are supposed to read Mac disks, but neither of them will read this disk.

The only thing I can think to do now is to write a progam to read the ASCII off of the disk without mounting it. Is that impossible? I figure it is, but I don't know what else to do. Can you help me?

Thanks.

I don't know anything about Mac diskformats, but a straight quick & dirty way to grab all ASCII from some disk without mounting, is to read from the device directly. For example to read copy all the ASCII from a floppy (probably device /dev/fd0), try, (being root):

strings /dev/fd0 >$HOME/floppycontents.txt

Good luck.

about the only thing i do know about mac drives is that the hardware is not compatiable as they were clever enough to use a variable rotation speed in order to fit more data on a disk.... which standard PC drives can't do (afaik)...

Maybe the Catweasel controller can offer some help :
"http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm"

There are also some tools for this card available at :
"http://www.tim-mann.org/catweasel.html"

I tried "strings /dev/fd0 > ~/floppy.txt" and it said "floppy0: probe failed..." over and over again.

Maybe it's an idea to try to find somebody with a Mac, and have him/her mail it to you or so.

Yeah, I'm thinking that's what I'm going to have to do.