floppy disk formatting program for windows 8

#Floppy disk formatting program for windows 8 Pc

Right now the drive is a useless waste of a drive bay in that machine. It appears that modern floppy controllers will talk to one drive ONLY. Tried reading /usr/src/linux/Documentation for clues… tried a few different settings, nothing seemed to make a difference. Okay, so maybe the kernel will auto-detect? No such luck, Linux saw a 3½” drive on /dev/fd0, but no /dev/fd1 appeared. The 2010-era BIOS did not have a setting for a “B:”. Then came the fun bit: telling the machine about the “new” drive. The desktop already had a 3½” drive installed that was working, I just swapped out the cable for one that had two drive connectors, and plugged in the 5¼” drive. My old desktop from the mid-90s, which had 3½” and 5¼” drives, died… so naturally, I decided I’d just move the 5¼” drive into my current home desktop. There was a twist in the cable between the two drive connectors so that one became /dev/fd0 and the other /dev/fd1. Many moons ago, floppy cables had three connectors on them, one went to the floppy controller, the other to your drives. I haven’t watched the video (I have YouTube blocked), but one thing I discovered about modern PCs (to my disgust)… Posted in Retrocomputing Tagged 8 inch floppy disk, floppy, floppy disk, trs80 Post navigation Of course, these days, you can read a floppy with a Raspberry Pi or - for the stout at heart - try an oscilloscope.

#Floppy disk formatting program for windows 8 Pc

Sure enough, the BIOS on a PC recognized the drive, although the geometry for a disk like this wasn’t in the BIOS choices.Ī long video, but fun to watch those giant old drives working and process of working through his issues. Some surgery on a donor cable from an old word processor made the connection. We had forgotten that the spindle motor ran on AC wall current and required a start capacitor. However, electrically, the drives are the same, so if you can make the mechanical connection, a conventional floppy controller will do the job.īeen a while since we’ve seen a big drive like this. The 8 inch floppy connector isn’t even the same as a 5.25 inch connector which PCs do support. But how do you marry a 40-something-year-old drive to a modern computer? He had a few drives of unknown condition so there was nothing to do but try to get them working. is getting ready to restore a TRS-80 Model II so he wanted to create some 8″test floppies. [Adrian asks the question: can you use an 8″ floppy drive on a PC? The answer is in the video below. These disks and their descendants ruled the computing world for a while.

At its peak, you could cram about 1.2 megabytes on it, but even with the drive you could lift it all in one hand. Somewhere in the middle is the old 8 inch floppy drive. Today, a tiny postage-stamp-sized card can hold gigabytes of data and weighs - at most - a few ounces. It also weighed more than a typical refrigerator. An old IBM tape drive from the S/360 days, for example, could hold almost 6 megabytes of data.

We should probably have a new metric for measuring mass storage performance: bytes per pound.