Find way to read Brother WP disks on PC

[electroken]

I have read some of the posts about reading disks in a pc which have been used to save files from a brother word processor. I have an 86 yr old friend who is in need of being able to move his files to a pc where I have some programs which can convert them to word etc. Then he would be able to print them on a normal printer and also send them to other relatives so they could read them or also print them. As the old saying goes, "No good deed goes unpunished", so I have been having quite a time trying to find a program which will let my pc (in any dos or windows mode) read those disks. I know of one called 22disk but cannot find a copy of it. One site listed here has removed the file since it was not exactly public domain. Anyone else have a copy so I can try it? Or maybe one of you might have another program I could try. So far I have tried anadisk, omnidisk, omniflop, and some other one. I can buy a program for about $40 but seems like a lot to pay to do a good turn. So if any of you have an idea, let me know. I also have tried to get one called 22disk144 or something like that such as was said in another post, but I was unseccessful.
Once again, I want to emphasize I am not able to even read the disks so far other than in the Brother word processor and I think I will be able to convert them once I am able to import the files from the disks into some kind of dos or windows pc. It is really frustrating!!

 

[Tedster]

if the files are saved in ASCII format, you should be able to read them.
The problem is how the floppy discs are formatted. If it has a proprietary format, it will be very difficult to extract the files, then you have to worry about converting the files.

The easiest way would be to print the files, then scan the printed page in a scanner with an optical character recognition program. Good OCR programs can cost a bundle. cheapo OCR programs usually comes bundled with scanners - quality varies considerably. You may also need an editing program like adobe professional - again expensive.

I had to do this with my fathers documents because they were saved in microsoft WORKS - a real piece of crap word processor and other formats. I have adobe professional from work and also openoffice. I was able to use both and convert the documents into more standard and universal formats.

 

[electroken]

everyone misunderstands my issue here

I have constantly asked NOT for a conversion program as I have never been able to actually get any file from that Brother disk into my pc. I cannot understand how I can be constantly mis-understood.
I have not gotten to the point of trying to convert the files. I simply have not been able to find a way to read the DISK from the Brother WP in any of my pc's or my Amiga machine.
Yes, the disk format is something strange and my pc wants to format the disk for me. Do you have any answer for that stage of the problem. Thanks for taking time to answer but I am not to that point yet.
The disk is a regular 3-1/2 " floppy and not high density.
I have tried an older machine but I would love to keep this in windows somehow as I have not booted up anything in dos for years. I may be able to find my disks for dos6.1 but then it would necessitate fdisk being used to make a hard drive useable for this. It may come to that, but I would like to know if that is what I have to do before going to all that trouble. That may not help me at all to do that so I would like to hear from anyone who has had experience with this.

 

[Dud1]

May be an old post, but if you haven't sorted it out yet...

22disk should get you around the problems of the different disk formatting (from what I've read), though of course once you get access to the disk and get the files they may not be in ASCII format. Apparently some Brother machines came with a disk that can convert the WP format to ASCII once you have the files down (check brother web site or google)

The reason you can't find 22disk144 on the net is because it's listed as 22dsk144.zip (no 'i' in the word disk). So jump on google and search for 22dsk144.zip and you will find a lot of places to grab it. The program is apparently now listed as 'legacy' (at least on Simtel), though has been taken down from at least one site (as you mention), at the request of the programmer (sydex.com I believe) who converts this stuff commercially. Earlier versions eg. 139 are also around on the net. Likely you will need to run this direct from DOS, so if you can't 'Reboot in DOS', you may need to go and grab freedos at freedos.org where you can also grab at bootable CD image. That should let you boot up in DOS (from the CD you will burn from the image) and get around your problem.

Have fun!