Interest in a DiscFerret?

[Guy Dunphy]

At 12:03 PM 10/01/2019 -0800, you wrote:
>On Thu, 10 Jan 2019, Guy Dunphy wrote:
>> All my Apple II disks are DOS 3.2. When 3.3 came out, it was a) too much trouble
>> to convert everything up, and b) ... read that 'missing the wave' story.
>> It gave me a sour feeling about 3.3. Totally my own fault, but still.
>
>If you get any of the existing commercial devices that can read Apple II 
>disks, . . .
>MOST, if not all, of the ones available are 16 sector.  Although the 
>hardware could handle 13 sector, you would need to modify the software. 
>Even the upper level (file system) portions of the code are likely to be 
>hard-coded for 16 SPT.

That's a very good point, thanks. Hadn't occured to me, but of course the
vast majority of Apple IIs ever sold used the 16 sector format. So that was
the target market.
Since almost all my A2 disks are DOS 3.2 13 sector, sounds like reading them
with the A2 then transferring contents to PC via some link is the way to go.

Hmm, I was given an Apple IIe about two decades ago, but never used it. Presumably
my Apple DOS 3.2 driver card would work in that, and it could boot DOS 3.2
Possibly that's a fallback plan if I can't resolve the severely flakey operation
of my early model, massively hacked Apple II. Assuming the IIe is less flakey.


>For the MFM formats, avoid USB drives.  They tend to be designed solely as 
>PC peripherals, and lack flexibility for even other sector sizes!
>For FM and 128 bytes per sector (problematic for most PC FDC), check Dave 
>Dunfield's site for MFM imaging utility, and test programs for some FDC 
>capabilities.

Not to worry about that, I have an attic full of old PC stuff including many
old floppy drives of almost all kinds. I like external USB hard disk docks,
but USB floppy drives - never had a need for them, never will.

Guy