Re: problems w/360k 5 1/4 drive

From: ray (ray_at_zianet.com)
Date: 04/12/04 

Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 09:27:16 -0600

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 05:16:11 +0000, Daniel LaBell wrote:

> Bill Marcum <bmarcum@iglou.com.urgent> writes:
>
>> On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 03:11:33 GMT, Daniel LaBell
>> <nospam-d4l@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> > I'm having problems using my 5 1/4 360k drive. I can use the drive with
> [...]
>> > There is, of course, a disk in there, and the drive lights up and I can
>> > hear activity.
>> > I've played around with boot params but, no luck, I may have
>> > missed something there, I haven't exhausted every combination of option.
> [...]
>> > 1) I have 40-60 360 PC disks I want to archive to CD and hardisk.
>> > 2) Believe I can config the drive to read CPM/C64 disks
>> > then I have about 40 disks.
>>
>> I don't think any PC drive with a standard floppy controller can read
>> C64 disks. C128 disks, made with the 1571 drive and an MFM format,
>> might be readable. Have you tried other disks, or tried formatting
>> disks in that drive?
>
> I should have mentioned that the disk in drive is standard 360k dos
> format, and works in dos and netbsd. I can copy files to and from
> etc. Heck w/ an old bootb bootsector hack, I can even boot dos
> 6.22 from it. Its the fact the linux refuses to even cat /dev/fd1 (etc)
> that is so irksome. C64 part is more the dream part of the problem.
> I just can't understand why it works under dos and netbsd, but while
> the kernel seems to see it on boot; it fails to work!
>
>
>
>> Any disk created by an OS other than DOS, Windows or Linux, or a
>> machine other than an IBM-compatible, may have a different number of
>> bytes per sector or sectors per track. C64, Apple II and early Mac
>> disks use GCR recording, which a PC floppy controller can't read.
>> Some other old machines used single density (FM), which a PC may or
>> may not be able to read.
>> -- Andrew Young
> You may be right. But I wanted to check this out for myself, having heard
> isolated reports to the contrary. I think the encoding will be the prohibitive
> part, and not tpi, sectors per track, etc. I have an old dos program called
> uniform that can read cpm disks for Morrow, Osborn, TRS etc, in single and
> double density, but I was curious to see what setfdprm could do under linux.
> Especially since the fdutils info doc CBM1581 disks and has FM encoding as an
> option FM=1. I haven't really tried any of this though since I'm assuming its
> rather pointless if I can't read a standard 360k msdos disk.
>
> BTW just tried mdir b: and it complains No such device or address.

If you still have access to a c64 or c128 (who doesn't - I keep a 64 and
two 128's around just for old time's sake) and a 1571 or 1581 (even better
- 3.5" drive) there was a program called Big Blue Reader which could read
and write ms/dos floppies. If you have a real need, I could probably
convert the commodore disks to 3.5 floppies for you.

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