10 Mar
2020
10 Mar
'20
5:49 a.m.
On Mon, Mar 9, 2020 at 3:24 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
On 3/8/20 9:39 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
Won't work. There's two reasons for this. First, the USB adapter talks to
the 3.5" floppy directly in a rather hard-wired kind of way. Second, the
USB standard makes drivers assume they are talking to a 3.5" drive with a
1.44MB in it only (though there's a common extension for the 720k floppies,
IIRC). 5.25" is right out.
Unless you have a specialized USB thing like kyroflux, but it doesn't
present a nice, simple interface to the system (though the interface it
does have/use works really well)
floppy controller supports the full range of
crazy that once roamed
the earth
Does anyone have any knee jerk reaction to the idea of putting a 5¼"
floppy drive on a USB-to-Floppy (nominally 3½") adapter?
Do I want to avoid tilting at this windmill?
Am I better off installing the 5¼" floppy inside the computer and
connecting directly to the motherboard?
I'm only wanting to pull files off of 5¼" disks. At most I'll want to
dd the disks to an image.
I've not had good luck with that in over 15-20 years. I have used
kyroflux to read ~500 DEC Rainbow disks and I have images now that I've
been able to read and pull files off of. I'm more hampered by archive
programs removing support for really old versions of the compression
algorithms :(.
That being said, I wonder if I should also be
collecting any different
types of images. (This may mean mobo instead of USB.)
Thank you for any pro-tips that you can provide.
My pro tip is to get hardware that's geared to reading a variety of disks
rather than hope your mobo has enough smarts to do it.
Warner