gemini://dece.space/notes/20230305-diskette-quest.gmi

My friend caiu (🦆) found a floppy drive with her name written on it in her dad's stuff. She had no idea what was on it and gave it to me with a smile. Could I get what's on it? What 1.44MB of mysteries can it hold? I love these kind of challenges and since my laundry room is currently the storage room for our hackerspace's stuff, I had a lot of parts to try to read it, and of course it was out of the question to buy a fancy USB floppy disk drive, so this note is about how I got the files back.

Alright so I found three floppy disk drives, all covered in dust. First issue: they all have IDE ports only, and I don't recognise the power supply port: turns out it's actually a dedicated floppy port that modern PSUs don't have anymore. I don't have IDE-to-something converters so I found the only motherboard in our stuff that have IDE ports and decided to build a computer with it. Of course it has no RAM nor CPU nor anything, but my accomplice Kholah found in his own mess a matching CPU, an Intel Pentium 4 with bent pins — yeah since we got kicked out of our place in Aubervilliers last October, we all have our own pile of electronics cluttering our homes — and I had the antistatic bag holding all our RAM bars (20 of them maybe), and only one had the matching format, whew! 256MB. The motherboard has no video output I can use so I plug a stupid video card with a VGA output and it can use my TV as display. I also have no power button so I'm just shorting it manually using cables and a breadboard. I manage to straighten the CPU pins and successfully plug it. Let's boot it!

But it doesn't. The PSU makes a really tired noise and nothing shows up. Once I got to see some hardware listing for a few seconds and it went black. Maybe this PSU was dying, maybe the CPU was heating way too quickly without a heat sink, I wasn't sure so I replaced the PSU and found a giant sink with crusty thermal paste, removed the obviously inadequate sink base on the motherboard and simply placed it on the CPU, no screws. Y-yeah, low-tech! At this point I was trying to plug my floppy disk drives but the motherboard was beeping like crazy like it was shorted! What?! Oh it was actually shorted: don't place a whole motherboard directly on a metal PC case.

Now the computer boots, but of course it can't read my USB3 key with Debian, so I burn a Xubuntu 10.04 live CD and use my uhm portable DVD drive to boot from it. It struggles to boot but after a few attempts I get to the live system. As there is only two USB ports and one is taken by the DVD drive, I have to use small USB to PS/2 adapters to have both keyboard and mouse (but the mouse doesn't work anyway).

Once Xubuntu is up it's really easy to list and extract the files, you just have plug your diskette, mount /dev/fd0 (fd for floppy drive), and… wait why is it so hard to push the diskette inside this drive? Oh there are diskette remnants in there, I should clean that first! OK, now that the files can be accessed, how to get them out of the computer? I don't have compatible USB drives, but I have a network cable, aha! You have to tweak your sources.list to access the old repositories and download curl so I can try to POST the files to an HTTPS file sharing service. It fails because the server refuses my poor TLS settings! I enable plain HTTP on the server just during transfer… And we're good! 🙌

X crashed a long time ago and I did everything in tty, getting constantly flooded with video errors and now out-of-memory issues were threatening every action, so it was time to shut it down.

Diskette quest