8-inch disk drives

From: Nico de Jong <nico_at_farumdata.dk>
Date: Wed Jul 23 19:03:47 2003

Subject: Re: 8-inch disk drives


--- Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com> wrote:

> DONE.
> the 1.2M controller in the PC will operate MOST (those wishing to list
> obscure exceptions,...) 8" "industry standard" drives, probably including
> ones borrowed from the minc.

Being rather new (3-4 days) to this list, I dont know if what I am going to say now, has been discussed before. If so, please forgive me.

There seems to be a lot of discussions regarding handling old / odd floppy disk formats. What Fred said above is a truth with severe limitations. It is my experience, that modern floppy controllers, and _especially_ those embedded on motherboards, will not read anything other then 3.5" disks (720K, 1.44M and 2.88M) and 5.25" (360K, 1.2M).
The older formats, like 5.25" 320K, not to speak of 160K are not supported, or should I say are not supported on the systems I've delivered for the last 8-10 years.
Please note that I only take MS-DOs formats in consideration. Anything other, like CP/M or 8" disks, is totally out.

There was a mention of MicroSolutions UniForm software. The software (at least the version I had) was able to read (some) CP/M formats by doing nasty things to the parameters in the floppy controller. When I tried it again some years ago, it was a total flop, probably because of the limitations as described above.

So, what is the solution if you have some disks which are non-MS-DOS or MS-DOS with strange capacities? The first thing that comes to mind, is to get an old ISA card with floppy controller. There are many "super I/O" controllers to be found which support hard disk (maybe even up to 500 megs! ) floppies, printer and 2 COM ports. Those cards can normally be strapped, so only the floppy part is active. When you _then_ try with UniForm, you might succeed.

The second thing you could do, is to save an old 386 from the scrapheap just for this purpose. Or maybe even a museum piece: the IBM AT. In other words : the older the better.

Nico
Received on Wed Jul 23 2003 - 19:03:47 BST