13 Mar
2007
13 Mar
'07
11:49 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 13 Mar 2007 at 11:32, Jules Richardson wrote:
Generally-speaking I suppose I can just mess around with jumpers in the short
term if there's anything I need to change between reads for different formats;
maybe in the longer term there's a project to add parallel port control to
ImageDisk and twiddle certain bits under software control, which can then be
used to do various things :-)
(I assume by HS and SS you mean hard/soft sector? I always think of HS as
"head select" and SS as "single step", but I can't imagine why
you'd want to
force-jumper either of those :-)
As hinted at in another post a few days ago,
I'd like to add an 8" drive (or
possibly more than one if necessary) to my Imagedisk machine in order to be
able to archive 8" media.
...
On many 8" drives, HS and SS operation is set by jumpers on the drive
electronics board. Some drives have an onboard FM data separator.
Indeed - I think I've come across that before. For drives that have it, can it
typically be disabled?
Seek rates and mechanisms can be all over the map.
Pinout need not
be the same (IIRC, Calcomp drives feed their power through the 44-pin
connector). There is less of a standard form factor ((i.e. floppy
slots and latch positions are not usually the same from manufacturer
to manufacturer). Power connectors can be significantly different.
Those are less of an issue I suppose; it's just cabling and mounting and power
routing! I'm more worried about signal incompatibilities, I suppose.
Forget about using a hard-sector drive with a 765-type
controller.
It doesn't work that way. Get a Catweasel if you want to do those.
Sure. I'm actually going to hunt out a decent Northstar Horizon when I'm back
in the UK; I wonder how easy it would be to hook up an 8" drive to one of
those (and whether anyone's already written any serial-port data transfer
software to use one as a way of getting data off 8" disks onto modern media)?
cheers
Jules