Brute Force
 

Hi, Ive got this floppy disk with an important tar file on it. It tells me the correct file type and the correct size of the file. But it only can copy the first 8kb exactly. I really need this file. Any idea on how to force the file to copy?

I tried writing a program but it can only read the first 8192 bytes (8kb) of data. Is there a brute force method to copy the file?

kwigibo

Are you absolutely sure that the disk is good? Just because you can retrieve the filetype/size doesn't mean that the disk, or file, is without errors. If the file can't be read or the disk is partially corrupted there is probably no way to copy the file, forced or otherwise, unless the problem on the disk is fixed (which would most likely make your file unusable). If this is the only copy of this particular file that you can get a hold of, and the disk is valuable, it would be worthwhile to try a different computer/drive to get to it (I have found that some disks unreadable by one drive may be readable by another). Instead of copying the file, have you tried to extract the tar to your hard drive? This would also give you some idea of whether or not the file is corrupted.

If your failure is due to a physical defect in the media (floppy), then you are likely out of luck. However, you might try using dd to copy the file as follows (assuming the floppy is mounted on /fd0): dd if=/fd0/filename of=newfilename bs=1024 count=XXX where XXX is the size in 1K blocks of the file. Note that some floppy errors can be corrected by rotating the disk media in the sleeve (worth a try, can't hurt anything).

Hope this helps.