11 Mar
2022
11 Mar
'22
6:32 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 7:25 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
There are no 5.25" USB floppies. Well, not 100% true (there are values in
the
identifier strings that tell you it's a 1.2MB floppy vs a 1.44MB floppy),
but as
a practical matter, you can't find them. I've looked and gave up... That's
how
I wound up with my kyroflux + TEAC drive (though a greaseweasel is a
better choice these days)...
If these are the old 360k diskettes, then you'd be out of luck the USB
route..
But an imager would be on the order of $30 for the greaseweasel, or
similar, and
another $40 for a working 5.25" drive and a few hours of your time to set
it up and
figure it all out... So anybody copying the disks for < ~$100 or $150 would
be cost
effective for this person...
The harder part is converting XYWRITE files into something more mordern...
Warner
> I got more
details from the guy with the disks. They are apparently
> "360K" PC floppies with XYWRITE files, and he wants to load the file
> contents into a "modern"? word processor. So hopefully, somebody can
help
> him, with a simple COPY *.*, and I think that
he now understands that
he
> might also need to get back a copy of XYWRITE
to turn the file content
into
> something usable.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2022, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
It was mentioned that he would pay someone to do
this. Why not just
tell him to buy a $20 USB Floppy from Amazon and copy them himself?
5.25" USB floppies seem to be scarce now!
I didn't do any serious searching, but neither Amazon nor eBay showed any
obvious (on first page) hits.
Some of the early USB drives, even if 3.5", MIGHT separate controller and
drive enough to be modifiable, . . .
I would GUESS that the "modern" ones are too "integrated".