Re: OT: Can modern PCs run 5-1/4" floppy drives?

...
>>Go for any old MS-DOS box from the mid 90's and a copy of Anadisk. >>I was able to read my old Kaypro-4 disks. And with a copy of >>"Inside CP/M" and a day or two of Perl hacking convert them to files. >> >>Anadisk will read anything that the floppy controller can process. >>Strange sector numbers (Kaypro puts sectors 0-9 on one side and >>sectors 10-19 on the other), variable sector sizes, whatever. >>It even, with analysis mode, said that the "previous formatting" >>information that PC-DOS 6.1 puts on your disk when you reformat it >>was on Track 81, sector 128. >Might be worth giving a modern computer a try, but booting into MSDOS >or one of the other DOS's such as DRDOS or FREEDOS (eg. from a >bootable DVD).

Looks like it could work if the current machine's controller still looks like a AT or PS/2. I dug out the doc file and the drives can be configured independent of the BIOS including the track to track step rate. They even talk about running 8 inch drives. ;-)

It was in Steve Walz's archive, or in the Simtel MS-DOS shareware archives (and the CD-ROM copies of that from back in the early '90s before the net ate that business).

I was impressed enough with its usefulness that I was going to send them the shareware fee, but it turns out (a dozen years after the version I have) that the original developer had sold it off and the then (4 years ago) version was "for police agencies only".

There is the problem of pulling the files out of the file system on the disk image dump. (Something that I do for entertainment, but your milage may vary).

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)