At work we have a very expensive (and older) piece of scientific equipment that for some reason refuses to boot without a floppy disk in it. The tech has advised me the manufacturer probably doesn’t have easy access to copies of those floppies anymore, so I’d like to make backups and store them on the department shared drive in case they fail in the future.
I’ve got some USB floppy drives, and can get an old (probably Windows XP-era) PC with a floppy drive still in it, and some blank floppies I got for testing to make sure I don’t accidentally destroy the boot floppy.
First thing I tried was this method, which didn’t work since the disk formatting isn’t something DOS recognizes.
Then I tried using WSL with Ubuntu. I couldn’t find where the drive mounted in ubuntu, so I mounted the drive to /mnt/a using sudo mkdir /mnt/d followed by sudo mount -t drvfs D: /mnt/d as outlined on both the Microsoft site and here. This lets me access the contents of those disks, but when I try and use cat or dd to copy the disk I get the messages Is a directory or dd: error reading '/mnt/a': Is a directory.
Am I mounting the floppy incorrectly, or do I need to get an actual linux computer to do this? Or possibly a non-USB floppy drive?
