RX01 Floppies

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Nov 21 19:52:01 CST 2014


    > From: Glen Slick

    > So is the original poster (Michael) really looking for already
    > formatted RX01 floppies, or will blank 8-inch single sided floppies do
    > just as well?

Generic _single-density_ floppies are what the RX01/2 needs. So AFAIK any
pre-formatted single-density floppy will work in either one. AFAIK,
originally, all SSSD floppies came already low-level formatted, but that may
have changed later on. (I don't recall if DSSD floppies exist; if they did,
the RX0x would probably just ignore the second side.) I'm not sure what you
mean by 'blank' - did you mean 'no data/ file system', or 'not low-level
formatted'?

The thing is that neither RX0x can _low-level format_ floppies (i.e. write
sector headers, etc). They _have_ to have pre-formatted floppies. I have this
bit set that DEC did it that way with the RX01 since that was the (then
minimally-used) IBM standard; if so, probably they just continued that way
with the RX02.

So you _can_ feed an RX0x xSDD floppies - if you first put them in a machine
which will format them to xSSD low-level format. (Which I think someone has
previously enquired about here.)

	Noel


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