Hi Michael,
> I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane. That sounds exotic, but still your BIOS has a menu item where you can enable an on-board hardware floppy controller. Do you imply that there is no header on the board to plug a classic floppy to that classic controller? > I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification Correct, but often the BIOS supports storage USB media. In older BIOS, this only works if you boot from the medium in question, such as a flash drive / USB stick, but it is clearly better than nothing. USB flash sticks are usually supported better than USB floppy by BIOS! There also are very few USB drivers for DOS which you can load after booting if your BIOS lacks support. In general, those also are better with USB sticks or USB harddisks than with USB floppy. So the question would be why you prefer floppy over other media? I actually have booted DOS and started Windows 3 from USB stick many years ago. It was horribly slow but the BIOS already had the feature :-) > Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin > floppy output for legacy 1.44 m floppy drives... You mean an USB case / housing for classic floppy? That is how most USB cases work, also for IDE and SATA disks. > Why not emulate a floppy drive if desired as well? Well, why yes? Other media have so much more capacity. > I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector. Your problem is that your mainboard has no floppy connector if I understand you correctly. So you need a CF to USB and not a CF to 34 pin. The name for CF to USB is cardreader ;-) > DOS if I'm not mistaken expects the floppy support to be in the BIOS. Usually yes. That means you can also simulate floppy using anything which takes over from the BIOS. The famous memdisk (often used with GRUB and similar boot menus) does exactly that: Put a floppy disk image on your boot medium (harddisk, USB, CD, DVD, many types supported) and load memdisk. This pretends that the floppy image is an actual BIOS floppy disk and boots it :-) > The advantage of floppies is they are easily destroyed. > > Try destroying a USB flash key How about breaking the silicon chips into pieces? Silicon is very brittle. You can also use high voltage to break things. > with Linux and Microsoft moving away from floppies, should > Freedos support emulated floppies? See above, there already is memdisk for that. Note that it does not usually write changes back to disk, but if you want persistent storage, you can just use any normal disk anyway. About your ATAPI ZIP question: I think some BIOSes support booting from that and using that as well. They are a bit weird because they mix floppy use style and harddisk size. DOS might treat them as normal harddisk and get confused when you try to swap disks. > bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX. Which reasons do you have to use MS DOS instead of FreeDOS? Reasons to use FreeDOS could be to have more free RAM and the FAT32 support. You can use most FreeDOS drivers together with MS DOS if you like, too. Floppy drives do not break easily and most have the same geometry and interface, so finding one might be easier than finding any supply of still working disks for them. Regarding your security concerns, you are right that flash chips make it hard to securely wipe data due to built-in distribution of writes to load-balance. You could avoid the problem by having only encrypted files on the portable drive. Then destroying the key effectively zaps the data. DOS versions of infozip at least support some encryption and you can use other tools such as 7zip for DOS as well. Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
