Reading old disks on Linux

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Sat Oct 19 13:46:01 2002

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Jason McBrien wrote:

> On a somewhat related note, is there a floppy drive make/manufacturer and/or
> chipset/fdc manufacturer that is more flexible/compatable with odd floppy
> formats?

Depends. Are you asking in terms of building an FDC board from scratch,
etc., or just which clone board to use?

The brand of drive doesn't matter much, with a few exceptions. If you are
going to use a "modern" drive (half height 5.25" v full height), then you
might want to put a switch in the cable to interrupt the index pulse
signal (on older drives, you can cover the hole and have it still work for
read) Teac 55 series will not accept that it is ready if the index hole
is covered.
Tandon TM100 is the standard.


For floppy disk controllers, the Western Digital 1791 series is a lot
handier, due to the presence of a raw track read (NEC 765 series does a
"track read" a a multiple sector read)
But the WDC 1791 series is not compatible with PC software (all of which
assumes a NEC 765 or equivalent.)

Of the NEC 765 equivalents, the 37c65 based boards are handy, in that most
of them can be used for FM (single density) without having to modify the
board.
Received on Sat Oct 19 2002 - 13:46:01 BST