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I would think that the most 'bare metal' way to read a 360KB floppy these days would be to use a vintage 2000 or 2001 x86 PC motherboard/cpu/RAM combo that has
by walrus01 2y ago
I would think that the most 'bare metal' way to read a 360KB floppy these days would be to use a vintage 2000 or 2001 x86 PC motherboard/cpu/RAM combo that has the standard onboard floppy drive ribbon cable header, and attach a real 360KB drive to it. Or a more 'modern' 1.2MB half height floppy drive that's known to be able to read 360KB disks.
If you find something with like a Pentium 3 1 GHz on it, it should be capable enough and with enough RAM to boot a new i386 linux kernel and userland environment, while still having direct hardware access to the FDD.
- II2II 2y agoI would be surprised if you needed anything that old. I was doing some research on my 2012 vintage PC mainboard a couple of years ago, and seem to recall a reference to the chipset one generation prior supporting floppy drives. Of course, whether many mainboards actually included the header is an open question. I also have a Pentium 4 laptop hanging around that has a swappable drive bay that could use a floppy drive. Of course, finding the appropriate laptop floppy drive will be difficult. PCs were slow to drop support for legacy hardware.
- walrus01 2y agoYes you probably wouldn't need to go that old. As I recall Pentium 4 motherboards of the generation around p4 "northwood" and "prescott" still had floppy drive headers commonly built into them. Probably there's some motherboards that have FDD headers and are also new enough to run an AMD64/x86-64 understanding CPU to run a current linux kernel without having to hunt down i386-everything for the operating system install.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoI think my AMD Sempron 3100+ PC has an FDD header, and it can run x86_64.