Back when CD-Rs were the thing, there were CD burner drives which would etch images in the unoccupied areas of a CD-R. These so-called LightScribe drives were a novelty of which most users soon tired, but they’re what’s brought to our mind by [dbalsom]’s project. It’s called PNG2disk, and it does the same job as LightScribe, but for floppies. There’s one snag though; the images are encoded in magnetic flux and thus invisible to the naked eye. Instead, they can be enjoyed through a disk copying program that shows a sector map.
The linked GitHub repository has an example, and goes in depth through the various options it supports, and how to view images in several disk analysis programs. This program creates fully readable disks, and can even leave space for a filesystem. We have to admit to being curious as to whether such an image could be made physically visible using for example ferrofluid, but we’d be the first t admit to not being magnetic flux experts.
PNG2disk is part of the Fluxfox project, a library for working with floppy disk images. Meanwhile LightScribe my have gone the way of the dodo, but if you have one you could try making your own supercaps.
Thanks for covering my silly little utility.
A similar project was covered on Hackaday a few years ago, but only did black and white images:
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/19/writing-pretty-flux-patterns-to-old-floppy-disks/
The major improvement in this version is support for grayscale images. I was surprised how well that ended up working.
I’ve been doing this already to my Apple II bootsector demos, i.e. http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/lovebyte_2021/
I wonder if I should go back and do this for my IBM PC bootsector demos now
That takes me back…boot tracing apple 2 games for…backup purposes.
Custom boot loaders, that replaced ‘start next step of boot’ with run monitor. Repeat.
I recall finding 8 additional layers of dungeon on a disk, just waiting to be undeleted.
All you had to do was get through the boot process.
Years later:
Employer was in some legal trouble. (Didn’t matter that money was back in trust by close of business. They weren’t supposed to take it Vegas, for even a minute. Winning bet didn’t make it ‘all good’, except it did. I digress.)
Assistant attorney general gave me a file to print (on floppy).
So of course I bitcopied the floppy and undeleted interesting things on the CA state shysters ‘scratch’ disk.
Including details of employers shenanigans.
They gained great respect in my eyes that day.
Mild mannered CFO Paul F had balls of stone.
Good times.
Sadly, nothing on that disk made me rich.
Undelete is still useful.
Will last as long as FAT.
LightScribe wrote images to the label side of the disc with the laser, not to the data side as the article implies.
But wasn’t there something that wrote images to the data side. I seem to rememer that.
DiscT@2 and LabelTag both worked on the data side.
I have an AOL CD with the logo etched in the blank area. Also, i could never figure out what is in the blank area of cds. All 1s? All 0s? The blank area has the same pattern as the the analog video portion of those CD video discs from the mid 80s.
It can be “neither”, but it’s generally all 1’s. The engraved “pits” in the “land” of the CD is how bits are encoded… the transition from pit to land (or vice versa) is considered a 0, and no transition is considered a 1. So, if you leave the large “no data” area unengraved (i.e., no pits), it becomes a looooooong 1 (technically, a series of 1s once clocking is introduced, but you get the idea).
There was a utility in lunix that someone wrote that would take an image and create an iso that when burned to a cd would create that image on the data side.. I cannot for the life of me remember what is was called (nor can I find it on the mess that is my external harddrive)
Right, LightScribe would only write on the label side of the disk. There was however also DiscT@2 which could write image patterns on the unused space of the data side.
also lightscribe looks nice but require special disk, other data side utility use regular cd but obviously, that uses data space reducing your capacity
I don’t recall tiring of them. We used gang lightscribe burners for duplicating CD and DVD with LightScribe labels of text and graphics them. We used them until downloads and Git repos became faster and easier.
I’m probably one of the few who didn’t tire of the LightScribe… still have a presumably working drive…
But this project is a rather neat art form!
Still have mine. It was a nice alternative to ink jetting on the label side.
funny, you could see this as some kind of reverse steganography.
Actually, with how rare floppy disk usage has become this would be an excellent candidate for “hidden in plain sight” kind of security methods. It’s the kind of thing you might use to hide key text or message. Considering how relatively new disk imaging with actual visual output is I would highly doubt they teach most cyber security people to dig that deep. But with all knowledge based security methods you’re relying on someone just not knowing, eventually someone will see past the rouse.
Funny, I have a working lightscribe drive and a sleeve of discs given to me by a friend many years ago. It is mounted in an external usb drive enclosure and still gets used on laptops with no optical drive. I have had to replace the belts in it at least once though.
It had to be done, of course:
Bad Apple, but it’s Floppy Disks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEiWHkRJau4