21 Sep
2014
21 Sep
'14
8:27 a.m.
On 09/21/2014 02:45 AM, Christian Corti wrote:
Forget it, that won't work:
1. You would need additional circuitry to control the drive. As an
example, the IBM disk drive needs the four stepper motor phases for head
movement whereas the Shugart interface only provides a step pulse and
direction signal. The IBM drive are much "dumber" than Shugart drives.
2. To read IBM floppies with a PC you ultimatively need a controller
that supports FM and MFM. Along with that you need either a tool that
understand the IBM disk structure or something like ImageDisk if you
only want to image the floppies.
I think that Ali knows bout the required FM capability (actually many
late PCs with floppy controllers can handle that, as they tend to use
the SMSC SuperIO chip for floppy access. Intel chips are still broken,
however).
As for the rest, it's not something that's out of possibility for
someone with an Arduino to handle the head motion. So not truly awful.
--Chuck