On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Nick Papadonis wrote:
Hi Folks,

Does anyone know if this has been completed or attempted?  Something similar
to what DOS ImageDisk or 22DISK does?  I would like to interface my 8"
floppy drives to a modern Linux box for imaging.

Are you talking hard-sectored 8" media or soft?

I don't think there's any magic involved in the latter, other than making a suitable cable and providing power - the ability to handle 128 byte sectors seems to be solely down to the FDC, with some better than others (many won't touch 128 byte reads, let alone writes).

It's been a while since I've played with the Imagedisk source, but I don't remember there being anything specific to handling 8" drives - maybe your best approach is to boot Imagedisk from a floppy and get that going first; once you're happy that the hardware's functional you can worry about the Linux side.

Aside: I did do some testing for Dave trying to get Imagedisk running in an emulated DOS environment under Linux, but I seem to remember there was some fundamental issue (DMA not working quite right, or interrupts not being passed on). I never tried with a full VM environment, though (e.g. VMWare, Virtualbox etc.)


Soft sectored.  I have hard sectored drives, but I'm not sure a controller in modern PC could handle them.  I only have the spec for a WD 179x FDC used on pre-PC systems.  Does anyone know where the modern PC FDC spec is?

I'll try out the known to work tools first and if time (and when I have the correct data sheets), will try testing out the Linux interface.

Thanks