Reading various format 5.25" floppies on

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Jun 16 19:16:00 2003

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Tony Duell wrote:
> Absolutley. FWIW, I _have_ written software related to this -- the 'LIF
> Utilities for Linux'. This is an on-going project (so don't moan that the
> feature you need isn't there, and it's GPLed. It's designed to handle the
> HP9114 disks only, so as to transfer programs and data between older HP
> handheld calculators and linux PCs.

As you've seen, it is a lot easier, and MUCH more fun, to write such
software than it is to deal with a lawyer who wants to open his water
damaged Northstar Wordstar files in Windoze Word, can't understand why HE
should have to do more than one step, and also wants to know if he can
return the software for a refund once he has finished his conversion
project.

> I didn't write a program to directly copy a disk (for one thing, my PC
> only has 1 3.5" floppy drive) -- I wrote programs to transfer between a
> physical disk and an image file in both directions. That seemed to cover
> it (just put the image file in /tmp if you don't need to keep it :-))

A very reasonable approach. It handles archiving, copying, and with some
software to parse the image, could handle data conversion.


> Of course. I was just pointing out that you might still have problems,
> and that a PC can't read all disks with 'western digital headers'. In
> particular, I couldn't read disks formatted on my TRS-80 Model 4 on this
> PC. I could format a disk on the PC with the same type of format and then
> read/write it correctly on both machines.

Can you read them if you block the index signal?


> > It CAN be done. I had already assumed that Tony dould do it. _Most_ end
> Why me? I am not a programmer. In fact I doubt I'm a hacker [1] either.
> [1] In the original sense. I am certainly not a cracker.
because
1) you are a hacker
2) you understand the hardware that it needs to deal with
3) you're willing to put the effort into experimenting
Received on Mon Jun 16 2003 - 19:16:00 BST