Questions tagged [floppy-drive]
Floppy drives and accessing floppy disks from historical computers, ranging from 8″ down to 3.25″ and other non-standard sizes.
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Is side 0 on the top or bottom of a floppy disk?
Assuming a 3.5" or 5.25" diskette placed on a surface with its label side facing upwards, which side of the magnetic disc within does head #0 of the drive reside on?
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Floppy drive detection on an IBM PC 5150 by PC/MS-DOS
The only functions of INT 13h available for pre-XT systems are the first six, from AH=00 to AH=05 (see here and here)
Since function AH=08 (Get current drive parameters) is unavailable, how does PC-...
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Did any software use "deleted data" floppy sectors?
The standard IBM System 34 floppy format supports two different types of sectors, "data" and "deleted data". In the sector header, data sectors are marked by an FB byte (Data Mark ...
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Was the WD1761 series binned FD1791's, or an entirely separate line?
I am wondering if anyone out there is familiar enough with the FD179x series floppy controllers to comment on whether they were simply binned FD179x's, or a separate line entirely? It seems the only ...
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Why did the IBM PC design twist 7 wires in the FDC cable and not 3
The point of the twist was to exchange drive select A and B, so that all floppies could be sold with the drive select jumper in the second slot, and thus their position on the cable would cause them ...
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Disable motherboard floppy controller DOS
I have a SuperMicro P4SCA motherboard (manual) running FreeDOS 1.3. The motherboard has an onboard floppy controller as part of a W83627HG (datasheet). However, this floppy control fails to provide ...
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Did RapidLok etc knock floppy drives out of alignment?
From https://www.filfre.net/2016/01/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-3-case-studies-in-copy-protection/
But balanced against the one great advantage of RapidLok for the legitimate user was at least one ...
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trying to debug old 1979 Micropolis 1016-2 floppy controller issue
I have an old IMSAI PCS-80/30 S-100. It runs Micropolis MDOS 4.0.
I have Micropolis 1016-2 single drive (doesn't seem to read or write), Micropolis 1043-2 dual drive (reads sometimes when the moon is ...
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Which wires need to be changed to use a Gotek floppy emulator on an Apple Mac?
Preamble
I own a Gotek floppy emulator that I use with my BBC Model B. It is the latest model with the Artery AT32F435 MCU1, so there is a lot of memory space and processing power for future features ...
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What is the maximum allowable error when aligning the magnetic heads of a floppy drive?
Today, I realigned the transplanted heads of a floppy drive by hand, and it felt like a herculean thing to do; as well as an experience I hope to never repeat.
Now that I'm finished, I want to ...
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How can I replace the floppy drive mechanism in a A-1011/CD-1411
I have a Commodore CD-1411 external floppy drive which I connect to a CDTV. Unfortunately it is not reading any disks reliably anymore despite cleaning the heads.
Inside I found a Chinon FB-354 rev D ...
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Is it possible to delete a phantom floppy drive under Windows ME without additional tools?
I have build a Windows ME retro PC.
In the BIOS I disabled the floppy controller. There is no physical floppy drive installed.
But Windows ME still shows a phantom floppy drive A:.
Everytime Windows ...
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Laser fd-100 Stepper motor vibrates
I have a Laser FD-100 that doesn’t work. the stepper motor just vibrates instead of moves. I took it out and greased it and still nothing. There are 3 pins on the board that look broken. What are they ...
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Is there any hardware that lets me use floppy drives with low level formatting capability on a modern pc? [duplicate]
There's a bunch of usb floppy drives out there but it's clear they're quite limited. I want the ability to low level format my disks. Is there any usb/pci/anything adapter that can interface with ...
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What is this diskette drive?
I am preparing a BBC Model B micro computer for sale which has been in storage and needs cleaning. There is a 3½" diskette drive with it, which was unfortunately stored with the slot uppermost ...
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How does MS-DOS 6 cache the DIR results?
I was wondering how the MS-DOS 6 DIR command works. I noticed that the floppy drive directory is cached so that the drive isn't read again when you run DIR a second time. In thinking there may be a ...
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Did something like floppy disk jukeboxes for home computers exist in the 70s or 80s? Would that have been a feasible concept?
Many home computers in the 1970s and 1980s had two floppy disk drives, or owners bought a second drive, to reduce having to play disk jockey. A second drive was especially popular with Commodore Amiga ...
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Can a floppy disk be formatted in another size for (read-only) backwards compatibility? [duplicate]
Is it possible to format a 3.5″ floppy disk in another size?
For example an original 1440 KiB floppy as a 720 KiB or 360 KiB disk thats (at least read-only) compatible with 720 KiB or 360 KiB drives?
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Apple II floppy drive, pressure pad cleaning or replacement?
This is related to the following question: Cleaning 5¼" floppy drives
Is there a proper way to clean the pressure pad that simply presses against the back side of a single-sided 5.25-inch ...
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What was the last 5.25-inch floppy disk drive manufactured?
Assuming that no manufacturer of removable-media disk-drives is still manufacturing disk-drives for 5¼-inch floppy disks - what was the last drive model manufactured / sold and who was the ...
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Is there a way to trick my 386SX laptop into thinking there's a floppy drive installed?
I have a 1991 vintage AST Premium Exec 386SX/20 laptop, which is in excellent condition apart from that the original hard drive and the floppy drive are both dead.
I've replaced the hard drive with a ...
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Did any 8-bit disk drive screen off the hardware? [closed]
The Commodore 1541 floppy drive was a separate computer in its own right, with its own 6502 CPU. It was designed that way because they were basically copying the design from the Vic, partly due to a ...
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I get I/O errors when writing a disk image to a new old-stock floppy in a USB drive. How can I resolve this?
I wish to create a bootable DOS 3.3 installation floppy disk (3.5″, 1.44MB, 2HD, Sony branded) for my AST Premium Exec 386SX/20 laptop.
I have bought a new USB floppy disk drive and connected it to an ...
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What do abnormal sounds or vibrations of a spinning floppy disk inside a floppy drive mean?
I saw this floppy drive sound emulator and this floppy disk sound video and wondered if the sound of a floppy drive or more specifically a the sound of a floppy disk spinning in the drive, could tell ...
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Why are the magnetic floppy disk drives (FDD) heads not frictionless?
After reading this answer to the question How long can a floppy disk spin before wearing out?
... one could see thru the floppy... Not just badly worn, but the magnetic coating was outright polished ...
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How does a floppy drive identify the first and last sectors and tracks?
I've recently found a more modern application "Floppy Disk Master-7"(Picture 2) (FDM) that visualized the bad sectors, tracks and clusters(Picture 1) on a floppy disk in a similar (but ...
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How to determine the required RPM for a 3.5-inch floppy disk?
In addition to my other related question Is it possible to read floppy disks at non-standard rotation speeds (RPM)?.
How to determine the required RPM for a 3.5-inch floppy disk as disks can ...
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Is it possible to read floppy disks at non-standard rotation speeds (RPM)?
According to this article 3.5-inch floppies rotate 300-600 times per minute (RPM). It is possible to overclock the RPM and will that result in higher transfer speeds? Or is it possible to read a disk ...
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Can powering on/off a 1541 damage a disk left inside?
The User's Guide for the Commodore 1541 disk drive includes a vague warning, on page 7, to "remember to always remove the diskette before the drive is turned off or on". Some third-party ...
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Why did the Sharp X68000 use 5.25" drives?
The Sharp X68000 came with two 5.25" floppy drives. Later models moved to 3.5" drives.
Why did Sharp choose 5.25" over 3.5"?
When the X68000 was released in 1987, 3.5" drives ...
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Why did Atari floppies run at 288 RPM?
Atari floppy drives for the 8-bit series, the 810 and 1050 specifically, ran at 288 RPM rather than 300. I can't imagine why this might be, and my google-fu fails to turn up a reason.
Worth noting ...
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When did 5.25″ floppies exceed the capacity of 8″?
When 5.25″ floppies were introduced, in the mid-to-late seventies, they would have had less capacity than the older 8″ because, well, less area on which to store data.
On the other hand, being cheaper ...
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How to repair IIgs 3.5 floppy drive?
The Apple 3.5" Drive on my IIgs still reads disks, but eject no longer works. The failure to eject is silent, no errors, noise, or motion. With a paperclip I can get the disks ejected but this is ...
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DOSBox problem reading floppy boot sector using INT 0x13 on a drive mounted using MOUNT
I'm writing 16-bit boot sector code. It reads "sector 0" under VMware with all the fields, including the 0xaa55 sig, as expected but the same code copied to DOSBox under Win 8.1 (x64) reads ...
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Why is my Commodore 1541-II stuck showing "Searching for $" whilst trying to load the directory?
I have a Commodore 1541-II drive. I bought this drive used (but like new) a year ago and I used it on my Commodore 64 for about 6 months, but I moved and just reconnected it to my Commodore and it no ...
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How was end-of-file stored on a Commodore 1541 disk? [duplicate]
On a VIC-20 or C-64, you could open a sequential file on a 1541, write exactly N bytes (say, 47 bytes) to it, then close it. Then you could open the same file for reading and start reading byte by ...
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3.5″ floppy drive shown as 5.25″ in Windows 98 SE
I have an old PC from the 90s. When I boot DOS from floppy, everything works fine. I have just installed Windows 98 SE and for some reason, the 3.5 inch floppy drive is showing as 5.25 inch drive. It ...
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How to use IBM SaveDskF floppy format on modern machine
Is there a way to write IBM SaveDskF disk images to a floppy on a modern machine?
The floppy drive is connected via USB.
Some comment somewhere said to use WinImage, but I tried that and it said the ...
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"Restoring" a 1986 Compaq Portable II (Cabling question)
I am in possession of a working 1986 Compaq Portable II. However, I couldn't find a 5.25" floppy with the proper version of DOS on it to actually make the computer, ya know, work.
I've since ...
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I can't read DS 1MB floppy disks
Using an USB external floppy drive, I've been able to use my Mac to back up files from a big box of 3.5 inch floppies (800K, HD 1.4MB). But I cannot even read my DS 1MB floppies using either the ...
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Reading data of floppies from a ZX Spectrum Swift Disc
Back in the day when we had a Sixword Ltd. Swift Disc floppy-drive we were ahead of the game on our speccy, allowing us to use 3.5inch floppy disks. See:
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/swift-...
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Why does an Amiga's floppy drive keep clicking?
I seem to remember that an A500 (probably A600 too) would keep emitting a click from the floppy drive. I think this was only with no disk in the drive, but I'm not sure.
What was that?
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Did any 5.25" floppy drives not based on the Apple Disk II offer quarter-track control
Unlike many drives, the Apple Disk II has inputs that control the individual head stepper coils. These are commonly described as advancing by half-tracks, since advancing a full track requires ...
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How can I format a higher capacity 3 inch disc on a regular CPC6128?
A standard Amstrad 3 inch disc can be formatted to CP/M Data format on the machine:
single sided, single track, 40 tracks, 9 sectors/track, 512-byte sectors, no reserved tracks, 1k blocks, 2 directory ...
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How can I boot or extract files from an IBM PS/1 with a DoubleSpace-compressed hard drive?
I’m trying to boot an old IBM PS/1, mostly with the intention to read out its hard disk. I realized quickly that the original floppy disk drive was broken, so I replaced it with a Gotek floppy ...
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What can be done with a USR file on the Commodore 1541 disk drive?
The USR filetype on the Commodore VC 1541 disk drive is a less common sequential file that according to some book sources can be executed as a program directly on the drive. The drive has its own 6502 ...
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Could a double-sided Commodore disk be written to be used as a "flippy" on a 1541, without requiring flipping on a 1571?
Although the 1571 is capable of reading and writing both sides of a disk, accesses to the second side using the second head will be performed with the drive spinning in opposite direction from how it ...
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Looking for a timeline or overview of implementations/inventions in the electromechanical part of 5.25" floppy drives [closed]
It's not so much about going from full-height drives to half-height drives, but about finer details.
Disk rotation drive - when and how was the belt replaced with a direct drive and a flat motor? Who ...
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I need to find a controller card for an apple II 5.25 inch floppy drive, the 20 pin connector wont work on the 34 pin controller card i have
I cant find any adapters or secondary connectors, can anybody get me a link to a working floppy controller card that works or possibly a connector that goes from 20 pin male to 34 pin female? i have ...
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Connecting old Floppy Drive to modern computer
I need a way to write on floppy disks from my modern PC (motherboard GIGABYTE z730p). I own a Panasonic JU-257A606P I took from an old machine of mine, and before buying a USB floppy drive I wanted to ...
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