9.09.2009

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..

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...but why would he take one sheet of printer paper instead of the $5,000 check? ...weird!