Creating 5.25" floppies

[Mike Loewen]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2015, Chris Osborn wrote:

> On Aug 17, 2015, at 3:44 PM, drlegendre . <drlegendre at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Any sense of what PC models / controllers are capable of this task?
>
> Anything that will run ImageDisk or Teledisk will work. It doesn?t 
> necessarily have to be one of those computers, you could pull the 360k 
> drives from one of them and hook them into a ?newer? PC that still has 
> 5.25? 360k floppy support. There?s usually 360k floppy support on 
> motherboards up to the Pentium III era.

    Dave Dunfield has a test program which determines if your FDC can 
handle single-density:

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

    Download the TestFDC program.

> I personally use an old ABIT KT7A-RAID board which has a controller 
> which is capable of writing single-density/FM disks. I?ve got a 
> half-height 5.25? 360k drive in it connected as drive B and a 3.5? 1.44M 
> as drive A. I?ve used it quite often to create disks from my original 
> TRS-80 Model I which can only do SSSD. I?ve also used it to make disks 
> for the Kaypro and even make disks for my HP-150 which uses single-sided 
> 3.5? disks.

    Be advised that not all KT7A boards are created equal.  I had one for a 
while, until I discovered it would NOT write single-density disk images, 
even though it's listed as supporting SD in Dave Dunfield's registry (same 
page).  I replaced it with an Abit KV8PRO, which takes an Athlon CPU, with 
onboard 10/100/1000 ethernet, 1 AGP 8X/4X slot, 5 PCI slots, SATA and IDE 
drive support, and 4 USB ports.  No problem with single-density, on either 
5-1/4" or 8" drives.



Mike Loewen				mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology				http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/