Removing release from this thread. I'm going to start by saying I'm a little miffed at the lack of progress on this, so I've now taken matters into my own hands. Jonathan very kindly shipped a USB floppy drive and some blank diskettes for me to run tests with, so I've been playing away with a little new code every day.
I've discovered the following re USB-connected floppy drives: * They are attached as USB Mass Storage Devices (predictably) but have their own subclass (USB Floppy Interface - UFI for short) with their own command set which is based on the USB CBI (Control/Bulk/Interrupt) spec. The whole UFI spec is available here: http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/usbmass-ufi10.pdf - there's nothing apart from the official specs to draw from though - no tutorials online, for example, so you'll have to know USB inside out to make sense of this. Lucky for me I took a course on this in college... :-D * There's a tool called ufiformat that's written using this spec (https://github.com/jumski/ufiformat) but surprise, doesn't work on my computer. Fails with some error message. * I've been writing my own ufiformat analogue using libusb - the modern and more correct way of doing things - and so far I've implemented a few commands (INQUIRY, READ FORMAT CAPACITY, FORMAT). It seems to work, but I'll do some more polishing over the weekend. * From the spec, UFI doesn't support capacities higher than 1.44 MB. Nope, not even DMF, let alone 2.88 MB. It can't even *read* these disks. If someone's managed to read high capacity floppies with USB drives, please repeat the experiment thrice and report on how it worked. I want to see if it's actually possible to use high-capacity media. * I'm also going to give the tool a thorough once-over re security, and then we can publish this as a tool which can be installed suid-root and then KFloppy can execute this via QProcess. This is how ksysguard works, btw - uses a suid-root helper running in the background, communicating over sockets. It's clear that FDC-attached floppy drives and UFI drives will need separate backends for low-level formats. Thanks, Boudhayan Freundliche Grüße Boudhayan Gupta KDE e.V. - Sysadmin and Community Working Groups +49 151 71032970 On 24 February 2017 at 19:43, Andreas Sturmlechner <andreas.sturmlech...@gmail.com> wrote: > ---Original Message--- > On Wednesday, 22 February 2017 at 23:05, Wolfgang Bauer wrote: >> My plan (now) is to query Solid for removable devices (not only Floppy >> drives), and offer them in the chooser too. >> But this needs more thoughts... > > +1 on that - I have an actual use case for this where regular users are > formatting SD/CF/CFast/XQD cards on a regular basis every day. A tool like > kfloppy is exactly what they need, coming from a certain well-known closed- > source OS. > > Regards, > Andreas >
