9 Mar
2020
9 Mar
'20
9:18 p.m.
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?
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.
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.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
9 Mar
9 Mar
10:06 p.m.
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?
The gadgets of this general ilk that *I* have encountered only really
work for accessing MS-DOS format floppies. If that's the scale of your
problem, and you have a compatible floppy drive, you probably stand a
chance.
If not, you probably need something akin to a Kryoflux.
De
10:32 p.m.
Off the top of my head, what floppies are you reading? Are they already
normal "PC" format, or some other systems? And if so, are they
compatible (read-wise) with what you have?
There are adapters for the various connections of a edge-card floppy
drive interface, and the 3.5" floppy interface (dual-inline?), it's
directly electronically compatible I believe.
But, as Dennis Boone says in another email about formats, the USB
adapter might cause issues with non-MS/DOS or Windows floppies just
because it might only deal with a limited number of configurations,
track and sector wise.
art k.
On 3/9/2020 5:18 PM, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote:
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?
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.
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.
_______________________________________________
COFF mailing list
COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
10:49 p.m.
On 3/9/20 3:18 PM, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote:
I'm only wanting to pull files off of 5¼"
disks. At most I'll want to
dd the disks to an image.
I have two sets of floppies that I want to read at this time. The
first, and likely simpler, is an old Super Solvers game for MS-DOS. The
second, and possibly more problematic, is Banyan Vines install media. I
expect that at least some of the Vines disks are PC format, but I
wouldn't be surprised if others were a Vines specific format that are
read after Vines (a Unix) is booted.
At this point I'm more concerned with saving the content of / files on
the disks than I am in saving a disk image that others can consume. But
I suspect this is biased in a non-trivial ignorance of what others might
want or wish that I had done to preserve these disks.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
12 Mar
12 Mar
7:30 p.m.
I ordered a Kryoflux board from them two days ago. I have plenty of C64,
MSDOS, and other floppies that I'd like to make images of.
I will report back to the COFF list what I find after I receive it. It
shipped today, but it's coming from Germany I believe, so we'll see how
long that takes ;)
I ordered this one, as it comes with a few extra cables and a power
supply for the floppy drive:
https://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=30
Cost me with shipping to the US: $144.41 , or €129.30 EUR according to
the invoice.
Very reasonable...
art k.
9 Mar
9 Mar
11:49 p.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
18 Mar
18 Mar
8:03 p.m.
On 3/9/20 3:18 PM, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote:
Thank you for any pro-tips that you can provide.
Thank you for all the replies, both on list and directly.
I'm getting the impression that I might be bighting off more than I care
to chew.
So I may be looking for a service that I can send the disks to for them
to be imaged. At least a reasonable take at it.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
1506
days inactive
1515
days old
6 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Arthur Krewat -
Dennis Boone -
Grant Taylor -
Warner Losh