Foreword

This article is about examining floppy disk layout, and ultimatly about understanding nuances of it enough that we will be able to manually read through and extract files from raw binary files of disks, know the names of deleted files, undelete files, and examine unused space on disk for traces of other files or hidden data. All of this by hand...and eye.

Two words of caution. This is technical, and this is alot of reading. In the actual article i am already up to about 6 pages and i havent even got the part on undeleting files yet! You are expected to have a decent grasp (or at least familarity with hex and binary numbers, and should be very proficient with disk imaging software or raw viewing of disk contents.

Anyway onto the goods!

The actual Article i am working on. - Note this is very much a work in progress, it needs alot of cleaning (and mabey a spell check or two ;) but it has a good layout and progression and should be pretty decent to follow along for now.
The experiment Log that first sparked my intrest. - This is a long chain of very fast thought and resultant experimentation it is full of insight, inspiration, errornous assumption and even uneducated misinformation :0\ anyway the reason i leave it up is because (at least I) find the progression, ideas and conclusions pretty intresting in thier own right. And hey its my site i can do what i want *nods*nods*
The program files I am building along with the article. - This utility is now a pretty good learning framework. ScreenShot

This release includes functionality to :
1. image full floppy (Imaging is limited to NT Only)
2. image first track only (analyze Boot, FAT & Directory data)
3. automatically extract:
  - FAT 1 & 2,
  - Boot code,
  - Directory,
  - clusters chains
4. parse FAT table and generate report,
5. parse Directory and generate report
6. hexdump specified ranges, clusters, & cluster chains
7. save data as binary file,
8. save as hex dump.