5 1/4" hard-sectored disk..

From: Jim Donoghue <jim_at_smithy.com>
Date: Thu Oct 21 12:12:14 2004

I have some 5 1/4" hard-sectored disks that contain CPU microcode. They
aren't 'formatted' with a filesystem, but are read with a simple board
that contains some 9602's, a shift register, and a Z80. A dilemma:
should I try to intercept the data from the board, write it to flash
memory, and build a board to replace the whole Z80/hard-sectored disk
thing, *or* try to build something to write the data stream out to
another 5 1/4" disk. The Z80 doesn't care about the sector pulses - only
the index pulse. So I could get away with a standard floppy instead of a
hard-sectored one.

The disk thing would allow me to keep using the original hardware, which
would be nice, but I don't know the first thing about attempting to
write the data stream back to the disk.

I have no backups of the microcode disk, and no way to replace it when
it dies. Every time I fire the thing up I feel I'm getting a little
closer to it's death...

Jim
Received on Thu Oct 21 2004 - 12:12:14 BST