Re: [Dorset] Borrow a floppy disk drive
On 29/07/14 22:01, Tim Waugh wrote: On Tue, 2014-07-29 at 15:37 +0100, Paul Stenning wrote: I think I have an internal 3.5 1.44MB one here (Bournemouth). I'll need to check to be certain but if that's what you want you are welcome to it as I have no further use for it. I should have a ribbon cable for it too. Thanks for the offer -- that's the sort of thing I'm after. If you happen to come along to Jelly tomorrow and the drive is easy to get at before-hand, it would be great if you could bring it along... :-) There's no hurry for it though, so no problem if not. Tim. */ I had the same problem last week when I was having a clearout and discovered about 4 boxes of old 3 1/4 discs from my past. It was at that point that I discovered that neither of my computer motherboards had connections for floppy disk drives. The latest doesn't even have IDE drive connections. The floppy drive is still installed in the case, just not connected to anything. I COULD NOT get it to be read by linux!! It seems to me that I should probably bin the old 3 1/4 drives in my store now. Luckily my neighbour was cleaning up an XP box for a friend and I was able to recover the few bits that I wanted from these discs onto USB. Peter -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2014-08-05 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
Re: [Dorset] Borrow a floppy disk drive
Hi Tim, If you have non-DOS-format floppies then USB probably won't be any good. In their wisdom, they made the USB interface only support normal DOS formats; no 1024-byte sectors, 10 sectors per track of ADFS, for example. One of them is labelled 'Minix' so might be ext or something, but the others will be DOS format. I wondered about external USB floppy drives, whether it's a standard thing or would need a special driver on Linux. The defined USB Floppy Interface wire protocol is the limitation. http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbmass-ufi10.pdf Table 5 -- no sector interleave possible! Table 35 -- Three formats supported: DD,80T,2H,9S / HD,77T,2H,8S / HD,80T,2H,18S. 80 * 2 * 9 * 512 / 1024 = 720KiB 77 * 2 * 8 * 1024 / 1024 = 1,232KiB 80 * 2 * 18 * 512 / 1024 = 1,440KiB Table 19 suggests sectors per track, for example, could be specified, but I think it's more you can sense one of the three Table 35 formats and then read 9, 8, or 18. Not even a mention of whether sectors are numbered from zero or one AFAICS. Hang on to those real floppy drives, and a controller since it's a partially analogue interface. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2014-08-05 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
Re: [Dorset] Borrow a floppy disk drive
I didn't get to Jelly unfortunately. I have found the floppy drive and cable. There are a few blank disks too which may be useful for testing it's installed OK before reading your disks. I'll message you off list to sort out getting it to you. :) Paul On 29/07/2014 22:01, Tim Waugh wrote: On Tue, 2014-07-29 at 15:37 +0100, Paul Stenning wrote: I think I have an internal 3.5 1.44MB one here (Bournemouth). I'll need to check to be certain but if that's what you want you are welcome to it as I have no further use for it. I should have a ribbon cable for it too. Thanks for the offer -- that's the sort of thing I'm after. If you happen to come along to Jelly tomorrow and the drive is easy to get at before-hand, it would be great if you could bring it along... :-) There's no hurry for it though, so no problem if not. Tim. */ -- *Paul Stenning* SP Technology Box 170, 89 Commercial Road, Bournemouth, BH2 5RR p...@sp-tech.co.uk mailto:p...@sp-tech.co.uk www.sp-tech.co.uk http://www.sp-tech.co.uk /Before printing, please consider the environment./ *Confidentiality* This email and its attachments (if any) are intended for the above named only and may be confidential. If they have come to you in error you must take no action based on them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone; please reply to this email and highlight the error, then delete them from your computer immediately. *Security Warning* Please note that this email has been created in the knowledge that email is not a 100% secure communications medium. We advise that you understand and observe this lack of security when emailing us. *Viruses* Although we have taken steps to ensure that this email and attachments are free from any virus, we advise that in keeping with good computing practice the recipient should ensure they are virus free. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2014-08-05 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
