[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[gtaylor]

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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

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[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[drb]

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 > 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

[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[krewat]

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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 at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff

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[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[gtaylor]

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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

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[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[imp]

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On Mon, Mar 9, 2020 at 3:24 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org>
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?
>

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
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[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[krewat]

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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.

[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[gtaylor]

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

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