4 ms·
It seems quite unwise of the OP to write-unprotect the diskette and run an "in-place salvage" software on it. With rare, old media like that, the best chance t
by 0815test 8y ago
It seems quite unwise of the OP to write-unprotect the diskette and run an "in-place salvage" software on it. With rare, old media like that, the best chance to preserving them is reading the raw magnetic flux data with specialized equipment. Even putting the diskette in a standard floppy drive might be something to avoid, but surely writing to the media is worse.
- LaundroMat 8y agoI was thinking the same... ADF isn't a preservation format. It's a pity the author didn't first try to make exact copies of these rare disks.
- tiben_ 8y ago"With rare, old media like that, the best chance to preserving them is reading the raw magnetic flux data with specialized equipment" Kryoflux is great for that. https://www.kryoflux.com/?page=kf_features https://www.kryoflux.com/?page=kf_features
- philpem 8y agoOr if you prefer free-as-in-speech kit, there's also Discferret (www.discferret.org) and a ton of other similar community-developed tools :) (Full disclosure: I'm one of the guys behind Discferret but it hasn't seen much dev work recently due to lack of time on my part)
- tiben_ 8y agoSeems the correct project URL is : https://discferret.com https://discferret.com That's interesting i was not aware of this project. I'll take a further look asap. Is there some feature/comparison sheet with Kryoflux available ?
- philpem 8y agoSorry, quite correct. Apparently I can't even remember my own domain name! It'll do exactly what a Kryoflux can do, including flux-transition-level read and write. (I'm not sure if the Kryoflux can write). The big differences are that it has a complete Shugart drive interface which matches what floppy drive datasheets advise -- so it's fully open-collector, with the right type of gates. This also makes it very flexible -- it's been used to read ST506 MFM/RLL drives and decode the resulting output. It's been connected to NEC 8-inch drives with non-Shugart interfaces. Its only major problem was that it was expensive - about $150 per unit. You could probably get that down a lot by using a more appropriate FPGA. If I did it again, I'd probably use a Lattice MachXO and the Yosys/Nextpnr toolkit, and possibly an STM32 microcontroller. Practically speaking if you didn't need Winchester support, you could probably use the STM32's timer and PWM peripherals with DMA reload, leaving a single-chip solution with a bit of LSTTL for the drive interface.