23 May
2023
23 May
'23
2:40 p.m.
On 5/23/23 02:41, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote:
[1] Actually, do any such devices handle hard-sector
disks? There
seems to be no technical reason why not, but I've never seen it listed
as a capability. But as just about all my machines use soft-sectored
disks this is not really an issue.
Disclaimer: My business is strictly retrieving data from media--I care
not one whit for creating copies. It's not what I do.
That being said, flux-transition devices are extremely useful in this
respect. One of my first experience with them, years ago, was
retrieving source code from Future Data hard-sector disks for Lockheed.
Back then, it was a Catweasel MK I that did the work. GCR encoded
hard-sector 8" floppies.
You can read disks that no LSI controller can handle. For example,
closed-caption 8" HS floppies created on a Zilog ZDS with 132 byte
sectors for Fox Home Video.
Currently working with a bunch of Wang 2200 16-sector 8" floppies from
the executive offices of Wang using my own MCU powered device.
So can one read hard-sector floppies with all manner of weird and
wonderful encodings with flux-transition devices, I'd say that the
answer was "yes". The more difficult part is figuring out what to make
of the data.
--Chuck