Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 16:49:41 -0800
From: Declan Moriarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The situation is this. I work as an 'Electronic genius' (hence the url)
repairing electronic hardware for industry. One of my customers has a
machine for cutting out glass which boots and receives data from a
720K pc compatible floppy drive. Although the drive is pc compatible,
the format certainly isn't. The disk is written by a drive in an
external box, which talks to his pc through a com port &
dongle. Without a good boot floppy, he can't run the machine or cut
glass at all, and he can't duplicate the boot disk. This system is
unreliable and he is held to ransom or just left in the lurch
completely by the manufacturer.
To duplicate the disk, you *will* need to get a 720k floppy disk. The
heads are wider on the 720k disks, so you will get unreliable results if
you try to write 720k disks on 1440k drives.
The magic command I would try for copying the disk (once you have a 720k
drive) is:
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/fd1 bs=512 conv=sync,noerror
This will cause dd to skip bad sectors and still copy the rest of the
disk.
The other thing that might be worth investigating is this --- are you
*sure* that it's really a 720k format? It may be using double-density
3" disks, but it may be using a non-standard number of sectors per
track. So that might be worth some research if there's any
documentation or other hints you might be able to dredge up about the
system.
I hope these few hints are helpful!
- Ted
