I just read the reviews on newegg.com, and the drive only works 25% of the
time. usb floppy drives are VERY flaky and consistently bad! once in a while
someone gets a good one though. no consistency: something about writing a disk
with a BYTECC and not being able to read on another drive...
formatting is needed when the disk needs an OS or if the disk gets flaky or you
just want to wipe it. for me it's a critical function. if it won't format,
chances are the floppy is bad. unless the drive is toast... then you can
format a whole box and they are all bad... you can usually expect a few bad
floppies in a box of 40 imation disks.
I need to learn how to live without floppies. I found a windows floppy
emulator driver you have to manually start. wouldn't hurt for freedos to have
one too since floppies are pretty much eliminated from this point on with
off-the-shelf motherboards...
I put out several pieces of software which use floppies:
- diskwipe secure wipe 1.27v8 (offline, may or may not publish again) for
windows and dos, includes wipegui, works with servers and raid controllers
- mbr save/print/restore for windows and dos
- freedos 1.0 oem (offline, may publish again, thinking about including mTCP)
My reasons for needing a floppy are:
- development of diskwipe & mbr. it's convenient to make a floppy to test with
rather than making a lot of coasters for every test version iteration...
- usb zip drives can't be booted off of with older computers, takes forever to
format with dos. they are also notoriously unreliable for data. read:click of
death
- drivers
- sneakernet for small files
- boot FreeDOS!
I am wondering besides using the virtual floppy driver, how you do without a
floppy to make a bootable cd, hopefully with an image size that is larger
than. I have miisofs for windows, it's a part of cdrtfe, a cd burning program
which works very well (except that it doesn't do multisession DVD's).
lacie makes very good products. I found this:
http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/LaCie-Floppy-Drive/6158918/product.html?cid=123620
lacie made 2 different kinds of floppy drives, one was a "pocket floppy reader"
which cost $20 and probably isn't worth it.
this one costs $183.
I had a sony floppy drive years ago where I think the head wore out after about
800 floppies worth of backups.
I contacted lacie, asrock, gigabyte, and syba about coming out with
floppy-based products.
don't know whether anyone will respond.
>________________________________
>From: Bernd Blaauw <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 9:30 AM
>Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] pretty soon no more floppy controllers, only usb
>floppies
>
>Op 11-10-2011 22:54, Jim Michaels schreef:
>
>> the world is going to usb floppies.
>> the best usb floppy is nippon labs. only it can actually format.
>
>Good to know. If only I could find floppies somewhere, they're neither
>made nor sold anymore I think.
>
>When is formatting actually needed? I'm not seeing many people use
>superfloppy sizes, and normal floppies almost never need to be
>formatted. Writing a standard 1.44MB disk image back to floppy also
>rarely requires changing diskette layout (except if you used an odd
>size, geometry or file system.
>
>
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