[clug] 5 1/4" SS/DD floppies

Kevin Pulo kev at pulo.com.au
Sun Oct 24 21:02:26 MDT 2010


On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 01:05:10PM +1100, Ian Matters wrote:

> On 25 Oct 2010, at 9:35 AM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> 
> > I have a box of five and a quarter inch single sided / double
> > density floppies probably written with a Kaypro II in the middle
> > to late eighties.  I would very much like to extract the files if
> > it's at all possible.  Does anyone know who would have the
> > equipment to do this?
> 
> Would the Linux package "cpmtools" (see
> http://packages.debian.org/lenny/cpmtools) help with this given the
> appropriate hardware?  I have a number of 5.25 inch drives laying
> about here I think.

It might, but then again, it might not.  Some of these old disks have
non-standard (from a PC/DOS or PC-CPM point-of-view) low-level
formatting.

The last time I tried doing this sort of thing (in DOS 5 or 6 on a
386, for my Osborne 1 disks), there were a lot of software that would
work for disks that were soft-sectored the same as a DSDD 360kb DOS
floppy (and so all that differed was the on-disk layout of the
filesystem), but IIRC there was only one obscure piece of software
that would handle actual O1 disks.  I think it was called '22disk'
(with an associated '22nice' cpm emulator for dos), but I'm not sure.

Another important piece of information is to be very careful with the
disks, especially if you have only one physical copy of the disks.
Remember that they are 25+ years old, and the magnetic media might be
fragile.  In particular, I think that the older drives used in the
original hardware were engineered better wrt head fly height, whereas
the cheap and nasty PC drives sometimes dragged the head along the
surface of the disk.  For old disks, this means scraping the media off
the disk...

I think Kaypro and Osborne disks had a similar (identical?) format, so
I can see if the disks can be read by one of my O1s.  Then if so, copy
the contents onto new media (which are also not easy to come by).
Then you'll at least have (relatively) better media to work from, and
hopefully avoid any nasty surprises like the above.  This is how I
plan to transfer the data from my old disks, one day...  I could also
see what state the 386 transfer machine is in, if I can find it.
Anyway, contact me off-list if you're interested.

Kev

-- 
Kevin Pulo
kev at pulo.com.au
http://www.kev.pulo.com.au/
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