tlug: Reading NEC floppies?

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Hi, folks--

Here I am with another ridiculous predicament (can you say that 10
times fast?). My wife has an aging NEC word processor, and is thinking 
about buying a new (non-NEC) word processor &/or a computer. Well,
last night I thought I'd check out some of the stuff she has saved on
floppies and see if it's convertible.

Her word processor can format and write "MS-DOS 2HD" floppies, and I
was experimenting with one of those. But between experimentation and
reading the manual I eventually figured out "MS-DOS 2HD" means a FAT
filesystem on one of those !$&*()%@^ NEC-style 1.2MB-formatted
disks. But I wasn't ready to give up, no way! I'll spare you the gory
details, but I found out that

# mknod /dev/fd0H1200 b 2 96

sort-of works. That is, I could mount the disk, but 'ls' just 
sets the floppy drive spinning indefinitely. I can create a
partial disk image with 'dd', but get an I/O error after 16 (512-byte) 
blocks). If I then write that disk image to a normal (1.44MB) floppy, I 
have a readable filesystem with a few files, but of course it's only a 
small percentage of the original data.

So the upshot of this is that it seems possible to somehow get the
files from those disks, but I'm not sure how to proceed.

Would 'setfdprm' help? If so, where can I find out the necessary
specs (they're *not* in the word processor's manual ... it's
'easy-to-use')? 

Or might it be hardware-dependent (my floppy controller is an 8272A, I 
guess ... dunno if that matters)?

Or ... ?

Thanks in advance and Happy New Year,

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido
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