While cleaning out my closet, or actually the attic, I stumpled on a box with old-school 3.5" diskettes. Unfortunately I no longer had a PC with a diskette reader so I ordered an USB diskette reader via Ali Express. I was happily surprised that it worked out of the box.

The idea was: just copy all the data and at a later point in time found out what to keep and what to delete. Unfortunately not all data could be copied. That's where linux + ddrescue came to the scene.

Install ddrescue (GNU version)

Use ddrescue to create an image of the drive. In my case, this was /dev/sdc. (In Ubuntu this was mounted to /media/erwin/[somedrive] Use df -k to see what your mapping is.)

The report showed 99.96% rescued, 2 read errors. So now it's time to mount the created image. (sudo mount [output.img file name] [folder to mount to])

Luckily for me, the files that I wanted to recover where 100% recovered. The only non-related issue I had is that by default, Microsoft Office complains about opening Word '95 binary documents. This could eassily be fixed by temporary allowing editing of such documents and then saving it as a modern docx file.