P4 board is perfect, but not the drive. If you can, connect the drive from the chipmunk to the p4 motherboard.
The pics in the zip show that the drive looks like essentially a normal drive with a standard 34pin floppy interface and standard 3.5" drive from factor. Not something weird like what's in the TPDD or in a usb floppy drive. The only weird thing is it's single-sided, which you can ignore. So it should be no problem to connect the drive from the chipmunk to the P4 long enough to create the initial copies of the disks. If you merely find some 720k disks, then you already have everything you need in your hands. Any other ideas are bad ideas. There are other things you could do under duress but they are all bad in some way and there is no reason to waste time on bad ideas because you have access to the right way. The dvi gives no software control over the drive at all, so you will not be using that to do anything but make dvi disks. Example, something you could do if you had no other choice: The next-best option is to use a real 720k disk in the 1.4m drive. The new drive should recognize the old media by the missing hole in the corner, and adjust the write head signal strength. That should make a disk that will read a bit more reliably in the chipmunk, but only partly. The new drive still has physically thinner heads and writes physically thinner tracks, double spaced apart, with leftover junk data tracks in between. The chipmunk has fatter heads and will pick up both the track you want, and some junk noise from the neighboring tracks at the same time. You might get clean data in the end but it won't be reliable or trustworthy. You would only want to do that just to get one good read from it one time to just immediately use whatever disk backup utils the chipmunk has to make a new copy of the disk using the chipmunk itself, then discard the one made in the 1.4m drive. The copy made in the chipmunk is your actual master copy. You can help that bad process work as well as possible by also erasing the disk with a bulk tape eraser (honking big electromagnet). That will at least clear out the junk data tracks from between the thin double spaced tracks. But do you have one of those? Next best is all of the above but using a 1.4m disk. It's really the wrong media for the chipmunk drive head and amplifier, but it often manages to work anyway. You would not trust it if you saw the raw signal on a scope. But just to play with an old machine it doesn't physically hurt anything and it doesn't really matter if the disks aren't reliable at this point. Just don't store any actual work on them. In that sense it's fine to use any disk, only because it's fine if it doesn't work, or works unreliably. Another option, probably better, is to put a 1.4m drive into the chipmunk and use 1.4m disks for everything from now on. It will still only give you 360k, but at least the tracks and head widths will be matched, and the head signal strength and magnetic media will be matched. You will just have a chipmunk drive that isn't really compatible with other chipmunk drives. The only reason to do this would be because 1.4m disks are a lot easier to obtain. You would use 1.4m disks instead of 720k disks after that. Which is all to say I would not do any of that nonsense. I would aquire a 720k drive and some 720k disks, or at least just the disks and temporarily connect the chipmunk drive to the P4. bkw On Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 6:19 AM Greg Swallow <[email protected]> wrote: > Got it. Thank you. > > I have a couple of P4, made for XP era, computers that have 3.5" 1.44 > floppy drives. I have gotten them to work as blutooth Disk+ host, but that > kind got pushed to the back-burner after the ROMBank failed. If that > doesn't fly then maybe I can use it as an excuse to pickup a functioning > IBM Model 30 PS/2 that has recently appeared on Craig's List here. I've had > pretty good luck with old Matsushita 1.44 drives working where ever I put > them. Even have a couple in my DVI. Now that's a thought... maybe I could > read/write TPDD and Chipmunk diskettes in my DVI? > > Greg’s <>< > Sent from my iPhone > > > On Jul 12, 2026, at 11:54 PM, Brian K. White <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Correction 720k / DD 3.5" drive. > >
