Older floppies, newer hardware...

From: Nico de Jong <nico_at_farumdata.dk>
Date: Sun Dec 12 23:56:17 2004

From: "Roger Merchberger" <zmerch_at_30below.com>

> All this talk about getting older drives to work on newer hardware got me
> thinking about a totally different track on how to get this done
> There are VAXen that have SCSI bridgeboards t
> Also, would those bridgeboards support 2 drives?
>
(1) From the days of my EMS days (distribution for Scandinavia) I have some
SMS adapters left.
The -512 is an 8 bit SCSI adapter, which connects to the -7250, which in
turn controls up to 4 floppies, from 3" to 8". I have a few boxes with 5
drives (8" DSDD, 5.25" 48 tpi, 5.25" 96tpi, 3.5" 720K and 3.5" 1.44M), which
consequently has 2x 7250. It could read literally hundres of formats and
write a few hundred. Not just as mirror-image, but also formatted the right
way. One could therefore copy e.g. an AS-400 8" disk to a 3.5" Sytos backup.
The software was called Octopus (DOS only (PC, MS, DR, ....), and could also
handle SCSI-1 drives.
Very capable software. The problem today, is that the source is not
available, but on the other hand, how many new floppy formats have arrived
since 1992 or so?

(2) Another way could be using the MicroSolutions Compaticard IV, but then
you still have to decode track layouts, directory structure, data formats,
etc.

Nico
Received on Sun Dec 12 2004 - 23:56:17 GMT