[COFF] Speaking of floppy controllers,

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2020 at 3:24 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 3/8/20 9:39 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> > floppy controller supports the full range of crazy that once roamed
> > the earth
>
> Does anyone have any knee jerk reaction to the idea of putting a 5¼"
> floppy drive on a USB-to-Floppy (nominally 3½") adapter?
>

Won't work. There's two reasons for this. First, the USB adapter talks to
the 3.5" floppy directly in a rather hard-wired kind of way. Second, the
USB standard makes drivers assume they are talking to a 3.5" drive with a
1.44MB in it only (though there's a common extension for the 720k floppies,
IIRC). 5.25" is right out.

Unless you have a specialized USB thing like kyroflux, but it doesn't
present a nice, simple interface to the system (though the interface it
does have/use works really well)


> Do I want to avoid tilting at this windmill?
>
> Am I better off installing the 5¼" floppy inside the computer and
> connecting directly to the motherboard?
>
> I'm only wanting to pull files off of 5¼" disks.  At most I'll want to
> dd the disks to an image.
>

I've not had good luck with that in over 15-20 years. I have used
kyroflux to read ~500 DEC Rainbow disks and I have images now that I've
been able to read and pull files off of. I'm more hampered by archive
programs removing support for really old versions of the compression
algorithms :(.


> That being said, I wonder if I should also be collecting any different
> types of images.  (This may mean mobo instead of USB.)
>
> Thank you for any pro-tips that you can provide.
>

My pro tip is to get hardware that's geared to reading a variety of disks
rather than hope your mobo has enough smarts to do it.

Warner
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