DriveSpace
 

I have (very) old hard disks with MSDOS DBLSPACE.00X files on them.

I have tried to mount these files (with "-o loop") and it seems to work (no error message). But the names of the files in these volumes are not correct (a lot of strange characters). Did I miss an option in mount ?

You have no DriveSpace support under (modern) Linux, and even WHEN it was, was at pre-pre-alpha quality.

BTW, also you have no DriveSpace support on any Micro$oft operating system, starting with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and beyond.

If you do not have a MS-DOS machine, I suggest you to create a Windows 98SE virtual machine, and to try to extract the data with its help. Until then, I strongly suggest you that you should DO NOT TRY ANYTHING capable to write to this files, if you want to preserve your old (but precious) data.

You also need to consider if titanic effort to recover these data is similar as the value of these so old data ... For that you have to do something VMware-Fu martial arts, to get the results ... :hattip:

Drivespace is/was a MS DOS drive compression utility. It does not appear to be supported anymore.

http://www.takatan.net/lxr/source/Do...-47.EL;a=sparc