8" floppy project

From: Christian Corti <cc_at_corti-net.de>
Date: Fri Aug 6 03:20:57 2004

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, John Foust wrote:
> I'd love to be able to read, write and archive my old 8 floppies, too.
> I'd once day-dreamed of getting a Compaticard and dedicating an old PC
> to the task.

I use the onboard FDC on my Asus Pentium 100 board which works fine in
FM, too. Or use any standard HDC/FDC combi card with e.g. WD37C65, DP8374
or the like that are able to handle FM.

> But as a file-format geek, I always thought a central part of the
> nut to crack was a metafile format. Archiving real-world antique
> floppies means some of them are going to have bad sectors. (Let's
> leave copy-protection errors aside for a moment.) You need an
> archiving file format that can record the fact of the known error.
> It would also be handy to have a way to store corresponding info
> such as a description of the disk's contents, as if you'd be
> able to store the label along with the archived disk image.

This already exists since more than 10 years now and is called TeleDisk,
also try AnaDisk to analyse foreign disks, both programs can be found
everywhere on the net.

Christian
Received on Fri Aug 06 2004 - 03:20:57 BST