8-inch disk drives

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Wed Jul 23 19:35:00 2003

> > 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.
>
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Nico de Jong wrote:
> 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.

IF your hardware supports 360K, then your HARDWARE supports 320K and 160K.
Any other problems you had were with your software.
With proper cabling and jumpering of the drive, the controller doesn't
know the difference between a 1.2M 5.25" and an 8" DSDD drive. (That is
what the 5.25" 1.2M was originally INTENDED for!)

> 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
hardly "nasty". They were fully documented settings to the table pointed
at by INT 1Eh. Fun stuff.

> again some years ago, it was a total flop, probably because of the
> limitations as described above.

WHAT limitations?????

Are you having hardware problems, or software problems?


> 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.

Be aware, that NT (including Win2K and XP) will try very hard to keep you
from doing direct sector access. Other that THAT, neither the hardware
nor OS (DOS,Win9x,ME) will interfere with Uniform, XenioCopy,
MediaMaster, etc.

> 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.

YES! But if it is lower density, such as 5.25" 360K, 720K, go with an XT.

Your overall chances of success are much better with the older equipment,
and using DOS instead of some of the new crap.
Received on Wed Jul 23 2003 - 19:35:00 BST