Re: Extracting files off “unknown” 8 inch disks. Any thoughts…

[Glen Slick]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 10:06 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
>
> As I recall, NT/2K/XP will read PC98 floppies if they're in an Imation
> LS120 Superdrive or in a conforming  USB floppy drive.  I don't know
> about legacy floppy controllers.  It might also work in a Caleb HD144
> drive; I haven't checked that out.

Windows 2000 should be able to read and also low level format the
1024*8*2*77 format on 3.5-inch LS120 and USB floppy drives which
support it. Support would be dependent on the firmware in the drive.

I don't know about any earlier version of Windows NT as that was
before USB support was added and I never looked at that. Support
should have also been carried forward in newer versions of Windows,
but I would not be surprised if it got broken intentionally or
unintentionally somewhere along the way.

There is some code in the Windows sfloppy.sys driver for ATAPI and USB
attached floppy drives which does have hard coded tables of known
geometry formats. Anything outside of those known geometries it would
not be able to format. The sfloppy.sys driver is not involved with
legacy FDC attached floppy drives.

Source code for some version of the Windows sfloppy.sys driver is
available online:
https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/blob/master/storage/sfloppy/src/floppy.c