How to backup LIF formatted disk?

Question

I have several old 3.5in floppy disks that I would like to backup. My attempts to create an image of the disks have failed. I tried using the UNIX utility dd_rescue, but when the kernel tries to open (/dev/fd0) I get a kernel error "floppy0: probe failed...". I would like an image because some of the floppies are using the LIF file system format. Does anyone have any ideas as to what I should do?

HP now Agilent made some tools that could read and write to files on LIF formatted disk. I could use these tools to copy and convert the files to the local disk but not without possibly losing some data in the process. In other words, converting from LIF to some other format back to LIF will lose some information.

I just want to backup the raw bytes on the disk and not be concerned with the type of file system.

Answer 1

I think you'll find the best resource here: http://www.hpcc.org/datafile/hpil/lif_utils.html

Also, if you're going to use raw dd, LIF format has 77 cylinders vs 80 for a normal floppy.

Answer 2

dd if=/dev/floppy0 of=animage.bin conv=noerror