16 Jan
2005
16 Jan
'05
10:10 a.m.
On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Doc Shipley wrote:
I've got one of those installed already. It's a Teac FD-505. My, but
they're useful. I have a stash of them. Whenever I get in a PC that has
one I strip out the drive before heaving the rest. What brand/model is
yours?
Sweet! Dell has the documentation for these drives online:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/37030/
The whole impetus behind this was that I was trying to read an old 360K
(might even be 320K or even 180K, I'm not sure) disk and while I could
read the directory, none of the files larger than say a cluster could be
read. I attributed this to the drive not being a "true" 360K drive.
Fred seems to be the Guru with regards to floppy formats, and perhaps I
misinterpreted what I read, but I recall him bringing up a scenario in
which a disk formatted as 360K on a newer drive would not be readable on
an "actual" (i.e older) 360K drive, or the other way around, or something.
I'd like
to make a box with four floppy types: 5.25" 360 and 1.2, and
3.5" 720 and 1.44. I seem to recall someone here did this.
Unless you need to be able to have 2 disks of the same size active at
the same time, you don't need four drives.
I have a 5.25/3.5" combo drive that handles all four of those formats
(and 3.5" 360K) just fine. The gorgeous part is that it occupies a
single 5.25" bay. You have to be careful with the newer x86
motherboards, though - a
lot of them will only configure a single floppy at the BIOS level. I
don't imagine that's a big deal in this crowd though. ;)
I'm using an older 486 motherboard, and it works fine of course.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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