[GLLUG] Old Panasonic Word Processor FDD -- can it be read?

[Jeremy Bowers]

Eduardo Cesconetto wrote:
> Hi gang, quick question:
> 
> - Do you guys remember those Panasonic "Word Processors", like a
> typewriter in steroids? Well, like every good mother-in-law, mine
> arrived from Brazil with a "VERY IMPORTANT DOCUMENT" in one of them
> FDDs, and since I'm the family geek, it's now my dutty to read the God
> damned thing.
> I was looking around on the net fomr something to read the disk with,
> but with no success. The format of the disk is not recognized by Windows
> or Mac, and I have no clue on how to try to read this cr*p under Linux.
> Anybody?
> Thanks.
> Eduardo

The first thing I'd try is

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=SomeFile.img

where "/dev/fd0" is your floppy device.

If this succeeds, you'll have an image of the floppy. If you're lucky,
you can examine this image for the file. If it's close to plain-text,
you might get at least the text out, although it may be in out-of-order
chunks. But you'll be doing this with no help from a filesystem; you'll
be pulling out bytes off the disk directly.

If this fails, then it is possible the floppy format is *completely*
incompatible with PC-style drives, and there will be no way to recover
the disk with PC drives at all. I'm pretty sure this has happened,
moreso with 5 1/4 disks than 3 1/2 if I'm not mistaken.

I wouldn't be optimistic about this.