On 3/8/20 9:39 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> 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?
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)
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