On 4 Nov 2011 at 16:39, Christian Bartsch | KryoFlux Ltd. wrote: FM or MFM? Dear me, if it were that simple, I wouldn't have bothered to even mention it. How about several flavors of GCR, hard-sectored, or written using drives with a vendor's own PCB installed on the drive? How about a Kodak 6MB 5.25" floppy with embedded servo? Things are really interesting in the 8" world before the advent of LSI floppy controllers. Often, manufacturers simply invented something. (e.g. doesn't at least on OSI format simpy use a USART, recording the entire track as an async serial data stream?) And then filesystems themselves are all over the place. It just seems to me that you're mostly concerned with personal computer floppies; i.e., the Commodore/Osborne/Kaypro etc. types of systems. While they may have been more populous in terms of numbers of systesm sold, they're only the tip of the iceberg. Floppies used in the commercial world are far more diverse in format, both in physical data representation as well as logical filesystem organization. Even comparatively mundane equipment poses its challenges. Consider low-end Brother word processors, which use either a 40 or 80-cylinder 3.5" GCR-encoded format. That's not too bad--except that Brother didn't bother to use drives with a fixed cylinder 0 position. When formatting a floppy, they run the head out to the mechanical stop, step one track in and begin formatting. When reading another system's floppies, they go to the stop, then step fractional tracks until they get a good read of cylinder 0. I guess it saves them from addressing alignment issues on what are very cheap floppy drives. My offer was to see how well you could do with the same sort of job I get routinely--as in "I don't remember what it came from, but can you get the data from it?" or "The equipment was built in-house and we've lost any documentation, but we need 10 duplicates of the boot floppy". It'd be far cheaper for me to send you a sample (media mail) than to pay your board price and international shipping costs for something that may or may not work. But thank you for the offer. All the best, Chuck

A meta-comment: I've been watching the KryoFlux discussion and, whatever I may think of the hardware[1] or past management policies[2], I'm very positively impressed with the people who are representing KryoFlux[3] here. I've also been positively impressed with the other people involved. Some people don't like some aspects of KryoFlux, sure, but the thread hasn't degenerated into a flamefest, in marked contrast to far too many other mailing list discussions I've seen. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B [1] What I've heard sounds good; I've never even seen it personally, so I can't say much authoritatively.[4] [2] Like opening it up - not the opening itself, but the implication that it hasn't always been that way. [3] To the extent that they _are_ representing it, of course; I'm not clear how official the representation is, but for purposes of this email it doesn't really matter much. [4] Given that it hooks up to a stock drive (at least that's the impression I've gotten) and is largely open and getting opener, I'm tempted to get one against possible future need. (I'm not thrilled by USB, but I've got enough USB-capable machines, and will likely get more, that it's tolerable. And, while I currently have no real use for it, it is not unlikely that will change someday, and I'd hate to discover them gone when I do want their product.)