Reading an old drive that was doublespaced

[redbeard1]

Someone asked if I could get data off of an old drive that had been doublespaced. (They handed me the hard drive.) When I go to view the drive, the main thing it shows is a big file labeled dblspace.000. It is a 120 mb file. What little I remember/know of doublespace is that it is some sort of software trickery.

Anyone have any idea of how to get this thing to mount in XP so I can copy the data? Or would I be better off seeing if I can resurrect something out of my junk pile and see if it would boot?

 

[Beau]

AFAIK, XP cannot read DoubleSpace drives. I did some quick googling and only found articles to confirm that..

 

[CTho9305]

I think you might want to consider VMware or VirtualPC - set up a virtual machine that has physical access to the drive and runs an OS that has a doublespace driver. Also give the VM access to a drive you can read, so you can copy the data from the doublespace drive to somewhere accessible. If you can do networking under the OS with a doublespace driver, you could send the files that way.

 

[Beau]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
I think you might want to consider VMware or VirtualPC - set up a virtual machine that has physical access to the drive and runs an OS that has a doublespace driver. Also give the VM access to a drive you can read, so you can copy the data from the doublespace drive to somewhere accessible. If you can do networking under the OS with a doublespace driver, you could send the files that way.

Yeah, I just thought of that too

RedBeard1, you can Evaluate VMWare Workstation.

If you're not familiar with VMWare, here's a tutorial

 

[redbeard1]

I did further research and found that Win98 has something called drivespace3 already installed. It is a protected mode version for Windows to read double spaced drives. I installed the drive into a 98 system, ran the program following the prompts to mount the drive, and copied the data off of the drive.