> It turns out that some 8" drives can be set to separate the sector holes > from the index hole (separate output pins for index and sector). Doing > so, gives you what amounts to a soft-sectored floppy, regardless of what > the physical object is.
The flippy 8" diskette I linked a picture of this morning was written that way. Took me a little time to figure out. Part of a massive lot of diskettes all done like that. I'm guessing the original owner either worked for Varityper at some point, or knew someone who did, and was able to acquire a huge quantity of hard sector diskettes cheaply. > I know that I used a Siemens FDD-200 drive jumpered accordingly to read them. Shugart SA-801 (or 800 with the LSI chip and 801 jumper closed) will also do it! Thanks, Jonathan