4 May
1998
4 May
'98
6:15 a.m.
On Sun, 3 May 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:
On an unrelated note, today I picked up a very cool PC disk copying
system. Its a small box, big enough to enclose two half-height 5.25"
drives and a power supply and controller board. The front panel has three
buttons: Start, Reset and AT/XT. I assume the AT/XT button allows you to
select between double density and Quad/High(?) density disks. However,
the button seems to be stuck. Basically you stick the original in the top
drive and the blank in the bottom and hit start. It takes about 90
seconds to do a complete copy. It does a track by track copy, reading the
track from drive A and writing it to drive B. I'm not sure if it will
copy copy-protected diskettes but I don't see any reason why not. It uses
some Intel micro-controller on the controller board but I don't know which
one as all the indentifying numbers have been scratched off for whatever
reason. The rest is TTL logic.
I made a copy of a 360K disk and it worked fine.
Sam, if you have the hardware at hand, try duplicating a non-DOS disk and
see if that works. I have an analogous box here whivh gags on anything
but standard DOS formats.
- don