technical question about harddisks

Have you tried converting them to images and use a virtual-floppy?

I've used

for 3'5 and works great, and it suports 5-1/4 too.

Best regards

Steve Sousa

hi Jan, recently purchased a 500GB WD to replace a noisy drive in my son's computer. Picked it up in the afternoon, walked in the front door, promptly dropped it on ceramic floor tiles. It is stuffed (was from a bulk box of drives, no padding when dropped). I have lost my concern for 24/7 life and other minor issues. Just don't drop the bloody thing!! Especially relevant to USB hard drives.

On a sunny day (Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:28:48 +1000) it happened "APR" computer. Picked it up in the afternoon, walked in the front door, promptly

I know, I have dropped a Maxtor myself :-) But it was noisy anyways :-)

Sorry, but not dropping a hard drive is relevant to ANY hard drive. DUH!

Think of it like you would a watch movement. Lots of things that do not like to get jarred much or often,if at all.

I don't need to do that. What happens is this: Client calls, problems with some really old stuff, might need a redesign. And oh, by the way, the files are on old floppies.

You can send this to a data service but some of the stuff is quite confidential and sometimes there ain't a whole lot of time. I do not need to then keep a virtual floppy around, it'll all get dumped into one directory called "XYZProjectLegacy" or whatever.

But it looks like it won't let me connect a physicla drive to a new PC.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

daytime (ATM at least).

on?'

would like to know.

temperature

down.

Yes, keep them cool, & they'll last for many years.

--
    W
  . | ,. w ,   "Some people are alive only because
   \\|/  \\|/     it is illegal to kill them."    Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------

me

l.

The older-floppy world is terrible and diverse. Commodore, Apple, Wintel, PDP-11, NEC, all the 'standard' floppies of yesteryear are nearly impossible to read nowadays.

Unless, like me, you have a basement full of old iron.

Some of the USB floppies have a separable controller; has anyone tried these on a 5.25" unit, or are we all guessing it won't work?

Or you have a program like this:

I use it all the time for backing up and creating HP LIF images/disks.

You'd still need your PDP-11, though. :)

allow me

animal.

Dawg, that would be an ugly kludge. But i bet it would work for wintel disks.

The 5.25 full height 360kB Tandon floppy drive for the Atari game system. Still works... on the Atari.

Tandon started it all. They even made the first HD for the XT at 10MB. I have one. I have a museum full of shtuff.

If it is through USB, OF COURSE it has a separate controller AT the drive. DOH!

The PC doesn't "see" it as a floppy until after the USB handshake and device reporting/hooks are set up.

Usually, your floppy drive interface is still right there on your MOBO.

So ALL USB floppy drives are going to have a separate controller. There is no such thing as a USB to floppy connection without one as ALL floppy drives (the raw drive) have a floppy drive interface.

If you find one, it MUST have a similar interface connector in it.

They surely use an OEM floppy drive with their interface. Far cheaper than designing a drive with a non-standard interface. If that is the case, and it likely is, they use the same connector inside for the 1.44 as does the original 5.25 drive.

SO, the only thing that *should* keep a system from "seeing" a 5.25" drive, plugged into that connector would be BIOS code, either in the floppy drive/USB interface, or at the MOBO, which is less likely.

5.25" drives have the same pin-outs as a 3.5" drive, but the physical connector is different (card-edge for 5.25" versus 0.1" pin grid for 3.5"). But that can be fixed with a suitable cable. 5.25" disks used different formats to 3.5" disks. There's no obvious reason why the firmware in a USB floppy drive would include the ability to read the 5.25" formats.

You *might* be able to read 360K 5.25" floppies, which have the same format as a 720K 3.5" floppy except for only having 40 tracks rather than

80 tracks.

180K floppies are single-sided, 160K and 320K floppies only have 8 sectors rather than 9, and 1200K floppies use 15 sectors (versus 18 for 1440K).

All of these affect the translation between the logical sector addresses used by the UFI (USB Floppy Interface) device class and the physical cylinder/head/sector (CHS) addresses used to access the drive.

It's up to the drive to determine the disk geometry used for translation, and there's no reason to suspect that a controller for a USB floppy drive would have been designed to recognise the 5.25" formats.

There's also the issue that 5.25" drives tend to draw more current than

3.5" drives, which might be a problem if they're powered via USB (the device must state its current requirement, and the host/hub isn't required to provide more than 100mA).