A:

fredag den 24. juli 2020 kl. 22.40.48 UTC+2 skrev Robert Baer:

you also use punchcards? :)

Your mobo has a floppy connector? Woooow...

A lot of cheap USB floppy drives say "plug and play" but they mean "plug and pray."

A real MAN would get a 50 pin internal SCSI floppy drive and SCSI controller card I believe a number of adaptec SCSI-1 cards are still supported thru win 10. it is also great for your Nakamichi SCSI CD-changer:

I use a Mitsui USB floppy, and it will assume the letter A: if the motherboard has no floppy on the SuperI/O.

I plug in the USB floppy, to run the memtest I've got on a floppy.

IDK, I'd probably look in Device Manager for a reason this particular floppy isn't working. If the drive LED stays on and you can't get the door open, that's probably a reversed floppy data cable (to mobo floppy connector).

Floppy disk controllers Standard floppy disk controller Floppy disk drives Floppy disk drive

Note: In BIOS, make sure you aren't using one of the more goofy mode options. There might be something like this on an older motherboard.

Paul

Right, I would think that's what OP is using also but unclear. Can't remember the last time I bought a mobo with such, 2006 maybe?

Had a manual cardpunch machine, never got around to making a reader. Traded for a paper tape reader that i modified so a switch would select step rate: slow, medium, full bore (no step).

One of the various goodies i still have is a Compaq Presario, still use on occasion as an ATE with data transfer via Sneaker Net. And THAT is why i need a way to transfer data to my Win7.1 system.

My older computers both support A: and B:, this "newer" one (ASUS M2N-MX SE PLUS bought Oct '08) can not support B: which is fine by me.

• Very familiar with that syndrome; NOT the case. Works perfectly as-is in Win2K.

• Like i said, hardware,BIOS OK. Works perfectly as-is in Win2K.

• BINGO! Remembered i had two TEAC USB FDs, tried one (WinXP right now). Very slick, as if an integral part of the system; was able to copy the file i needed. Prolly be that way in Win7.1; THANKS.

BINGO! Remembered i had a few USB external TEAC FDs, tried one WinXP, popped up as drive B: which is appropriate. Worked so well i fully expect it to work as easily in Win7.1; THANKS.

I'm curious since I haven't tried a USB based floppy drive, and considering that AFAIK, USB based storage devices are mass-storage driven.

Can it be used to create a custom format floppy such as 2MF, XDF, 3M, etc.? i.e. custom number of sectors per track, interleaved sectors, gap length, etc.

Used to have a SCSI 3.5" floppy from Teac, bought around 1993. The *only* floppy drive which I could make read the floppies from my old 6809 system, 256 bytes/sector, without me having written its controller.... (the one on the 6809 system was mine but it was a normal floppy accessed via a upd765). I still feel like crying when I think of it, fried it 15 or 20 years ago using a bad SCSI cable I had made...

Dimiter

====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI

Am 25.07.20 um 19:52 schrieb Dimiter_Popoff:

I have a USB floppy drive sold by Hama, the usual computer store stuff here. It works reliably only on a USB3 port because USB2 does not deliver enough power for the motor / head.

Works without issues, also with the old spectrum analyzers, scopes, the Anritsu pulse pattern generator, and with the

cheers, Gerhard

VID 03EE PID 6901 (Rev 0100)

The box for mine shows 1.44MB only.

But the company seemed to make complete drive products themselves.

The web page with the English version of the catalog is missing, which adds to the fun. I was trying to find that chip.

Paul

I've got an older IBM external floppy drive that only works if you turn it upside down . . . . but it runs happily on USB2 power levels.

RL

I am pretty sure these all do 512 byte sectors, not sure if many people but me ever did 256 byte sectors for a long time. My 256 bytes per sector came because I wanted to run MDOS09 (the one which came on Motorola Exorsisers) which is implicitly 128 bytes per sector, a maximum of 4096 sectors per drive. So the floppy controller had to do read-modify-write when the OS asked it to update in the middle of a 256 byte sector; while doing the same with 512 bytes is basically doable it was impractical back then (the floppy controller had to fit into 2k ROM, RAM was scarce etc.). And that TEAC SCSI drive could be configured via a SCSI command such that it would do 256 byte sectors, I could set gaps etc., lowest level controller stuff and it worked.... Did a great job copying my floppies into files back in the day. Well it did cost $300 if not more of course.

BTW I can *still* run MDOS09 just like I used to, emulated in a DPS window... The floppies it addresses now are just allocated pieces of RAM which come from/go to files of course.

Dimiter

====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI

IIRC, the WD1793 / 2793 floppy controllers could do a lot of formats that nobody else could do. I still have a Z80, a 80186 and a 386 I designed at this time that use them. The 186 & 386 have also a WD SCSI interface and a transputer link adaptor.

Somewhere in a box under my roof.

:-) Gerhard

Well,

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I could bust one of my USB FDs apart for look-see, but a bit leery of doing so..

For the curious here's how you can use the old Adaptec SCSI-1 PCI cards on a 64 bit Win 10 system: