Reading Floppies under RISC OS

Attempting to connect a USB laptop floppy drive to Pi via USB hub. Can't "see" the drive, but doesn't lock the OS. I'm therefore assuming that the drive is recognised, but it doesn't appear on the desktop. I've added a floppy drive in configure. Is there anything I'm missing??

I could be wrong and the Pi is clearly a very different beast but, if I recall correctly, USB floppy drives won't work under RISC OS at all. This comes up in discussion on the use of floppies with things like Virtual Acorn on a standard Desktop machine. Internal floppy drives can be made to read RO discs and work properly but USB ones won't. I understand this is something to do with being able to access the motherboard floppy controller in a way impossible via USB

I could be wrong and the Pi is clearly a very different beast but, if I rec all correctly, USB floppy drives won't work under RISC OS at all. This come s up in discussion on the use of floppies with things like Virtual Acorn on a standard Desktop machine. Internal floppy drives can be made to read RO discs and work properly but USB ones won't. I understand this is something to do with being able to access the motherboard floppy controller in a way impossible via USB -- Stuart Winsor Midlands RISC OS and Raspberry pi show, 13th July 2013

AFAIK... HD floppies under ADFS use 512 byte sectors, don't they? I know th e DD ones didn't, but aren't HD floppies formatted the same way as hard dri ves? Or is that just the placement of the catalogue & map.

I guess the next thing to ask, is whether anyone's managed to hack an inter nal floppy drive to connect either directly or indirectly to the GPIO pins. I'm still using floppies to carry stuff around between two A7000+ machines . Would be nice to be able to easily transfer stuff between these and RO on the pi. Nope... I haven't got USB or card readers on the A7Ks.

The other possibility I suppose is writing something that will image ADFS f loppies under the stock Linux using a USB connected floppy and doing things that way... Or is it the USB connection in any OS that prevents the FDC fr om being programmed.

The USB floppy drive should be seen as a USB storage device unless its some horrible proprietary thing which only works with a Windows driver (try it under Linux).

However, they will only read DOS format floppies, as the controllers will only understand 512 byte sectors rather than the 1024 bytes used by RISC OS E/F and E+/F+ formats.

---druck

ADFS E/F (800K/1600K) and E+/F+ (with long filenames and >77 files per directory) formats have 1024 byte sectors, as opposed to the 512 byte ones used by DOS 720K and 1.4MB formats, which a USB floppy will be expecting. There are also other issues such as sector numbering and skew which are incompatible.

The old ADFS L format (640K) does have 512byte sectors, but IIRC support has been dropped from RISC OS 5

---druck

sounds real tricky

Sounds about as easy as doing the same with RISC-OS (IOW impossible)

Have you considered a LAN?

Yes, it does not seem to be possible to access the firmware or change it using a standard USB floppy drive from any os.

What I have found it this special controler available which supports ASFS disc:

Michael

Kryoflux is really only useful for imaging floppies, you certainly couldn't use it directly on RO. Under the Archimedes Software Project we have coded a Kryoflux image to APD converter for imaging protected floppies, but there are easier tools to image non-protected floppies.

Kryoflux as such doesn't directly support ADFS floppies, however you can create a profile with 512 / 1024 bytes per sector to create ADF images.

The easiest way to transfer is to network everything and use FTP, which is how we do it in the project. With 8 machines in constant use, the simplest solution was to put an FTP server on the Windows machine and either FTP individual files or floppy images created with ADFFS or ADFimager etc. between the RO based machines. All of those have ADFFS running so the floppies can simply be mounted as you would physical ones.