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

STeve Andre' andres at msu.edu
Fri May 12 15:02:12 EDT 2006


On Friday 12 May 2006 14:46, 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

I have the disgusting solution for you, which isn't great (actually, its
disgusting) but it might work.

Suck the floppy up onto your system.  In OpenBSD I'd do 

   dd if=/dev/rfd0c of=floppy bs=8k

I'd then have a 1.44M file called floppy.  Now for the disgusting
part:  run strings on it and pick out all the human readable 
stuff, like

   strings -8 floppy > strs

and you now have a collection of stuff thats at least 8 chars long.

Depending on just how the Panasonic stores stuff, you'll get globs
of text, and if you are a little lucky you'll see the the text of the
imoortant document.

I did this once for a laywer who desperately needed data from a
German word processor (Siemens) and this is how we got the
document that went to court the next morning.

It's frought with problems, but you might be able to get the 
desired information this way.

Good luck.

--STeve Andre'


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