Good way to archive system disks

From: Dave Mabry <dmabry_at_mich.com>
Date: Sun Dec 23 23:29:19 2001

I think I've still got a problem doing this, though. The 5 1/4 inch
diskettes that I want to image are 96 tpi and standard PC diskette
drives are 48 tpi. Although the 1.2M AT-style ones were 96 tpi. Not
sure if I can make one of them work. That might be worth a try.

Another obstacle is that 440BX chipsets only control one floppy drive.
I don't have an older PC that can control two floppy drives. Am I
missing something here?

The 8 inch diskettes are Intel's somewhat unique M2FM, not the more
standard MFM. So I doubt that there is any diskette controller for the
PC that would read them.

What I was hoping for was a program that would run under CP/M on the
target machine that would allow me to make an image file of a diskette
on that machine. Then I could transfer that image file over to a PC and
put it on a CD. Thinking about it, though, I might end up with a catch
22. In order to make a diskette from one of those images would require
a running CP/M machine.

Are you saying below that a 96 tpi 5 1/4 inch diskette drive can plug
into a PC and be detected as a 720K 3.5 inch drive?

More for me to think about. Thanks.

"Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" wrote:
>
> > It might be possible to hook up the 8" drives to a PC but choose the 1.2 meg
> > 5.25" option in bios but I don't know. It probably wouldn't work but I'll
> > let someone else confirm that.
>
> It works. just a matter of cabling, as the 1.2M is virtually
> indistinguishable from 8". But cable it as drive B:, because some BIOS's
> will have a problem with it not having a 360K mode.
>
> And 5.25" 720K and 3.5" 720K are direct replacements for each other.

-- 
Dave Mabry             dmabry_at_mich.com
Dossin Museum Underwater Research Team
NACD #2093
Received on Sun Dec 23 2001 - 23:29:19 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:41 BST