[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 990 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20200309/cccea58a/attachment.bin>
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 466 bytes --] > 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
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1699 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20200309/63aad690/attachment.html>
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1125 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20200309/388f3086/attachment.bin>
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1903 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20200309/7df835ed/attachment.html>
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 591 bytes --] 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.
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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20200318/05f12e5e/attachment.bin>