cctalk Digest, Vol 79, Issue 44

I don't know what the market is like in Europe, but I can still buy new media in 5.25" and 3.5" format easily here in the U.S. Google brings up many places here. If there are no such outlets in the UK, maybe you can get a bulk order together with some local folks to save on the shipping costs? Al From: Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> Subject: Reusing old floppy *drives* Noting the discussion on old media, a slightly different question. Please excuse my profound ignorance on matters electronic! I have read, somewhere, that it is possible to connect HD floppy drives to elderly kit that is only expecting DD drives, and use them for just DD operation. More specifically, I'd like to resurrect my ancient Sinclair Spectrum with its MGT DISCiPLE disk interface. Way back in the 1980s, I used 5?" media, as they were still cheaper. However, now, I daresay I won't find any new 5?" media and even 3?" DD media are getting tricky. So what I was considering doing was connecting a pair of old PC floppy drives - 3?" HD (1.4MB) floppies - and quite possibly using 1.4MB media, but only formatting them to 720K and using them as 720K. IIRC, the drives permit this. The track widths are the same - both are 80t drives - it's just that DD used 9 sectors per track and HD 18. Is this likely to work? I realise I'll need to find drives with a unit selection jumper on them, so I can set one as 0 and the other as 1; no twists in the cables this far back, & I'm guessing that a twisted cable wouldn't work with a controller that wasn't expecting it...? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508