Drive inventory

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Thu Feb 14 16:51:59 2002

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Sellam Ismail wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Tothwolf wrote:
>
> > That would work well if all the tape drives that use the floppy
> > interface followed the rules, but not all do. I guess it would be
> > possible to build a board with some logic chips that could isolate
> > individual drives from the bus, but I think it would be much easier for
> > now to only connect one drive at a time.
>
> Can you elucidate? How can a floppy interface tape drive not follow the
> rules and still work?

Been quite a long time since I had to fight with those kinds of drives,
but certain brands and models did things their own way. I don't recall
exact brands/models now, but I'm sure you'll find them over time. Some had
special cables that swapped signals around or removed other signals from
the connector completely. There were even some that used custom
pass-through cables that would feed certain signals for the floppy drive
through the tape drive. Old tape drives for PC systems are going to be the
hardest part of getting a data conversion "lab" set up.

-Toth
Received on Thu Feb 14 2002 - 16:51:59 GMT