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IDE Floppy Disk + Debian: anything to consider?
(sh.itjust.works)
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Wow, floppies.
I would suggest looking for a 3.5" unit rather than 5.25", the small floppies are sturdier.
Even so a floppy can get corrupted at any time so personally I wouldn't bother with a filesystem and mounting it, I'd just write a bunch of numbers in various places on the disk and attempt to read with dd from several spots.
If you want to go with a filesystem and mount, please be aware that floppy units don't send a signal when you load a floppy, like CD units do. You just have to try and see if there's anything in there.
You can use automount to mount a floppy when you access a directory but it's more trouble then it's worth imo.
Oh and it also takes a while for the drive to probe and access the floppy (can take 5-10 seconds).
If you want my opinion, I'd do anything except actually having to bother reading floppies. 🙂 I would look into an USB smartcard reader and use smartcards instead.
If that's not cool enough and you really want to use floppies, I'd conceal an USB NFC reader inside the PC and stick NFC tags to the floppies and load them inside the unit purely for the cool factor, without actually hooking up the floppy drive. Not sure if they'll be easily readable from inside the drive but I'd try, like I said I'd do anything. 😄