On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:08 PM, walt <w41...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 01/29/2012 12:04 PM, Dale wrote: >> Mark Knecht wrote: > >>> A single USB thumb drive for $20 would likely hold every floppy he >>> ever made, and maybe 10-20 times more. Why waste time making & sorting >>> through CDs, etc? > >> Hmmmm, super point. May suggest that. I got to boot something to see >> what this rig has in it. It may be a older system. I'm pretty sure I >> saw USB tho. >> >> I bet USB has a better life span than floppies too. > > Boy that's the truth. All of my three (working) old machines still have > floppy drives, but my next one won't.
Yeah, I haven't had a box with a floppy drive in quite some time. > And good riddance, too. Last > time I made a floppy boot disk (years ago) I had to format about a dozen > floppies before I found a good one :p FWIW, you could probably have fixed them by using superformat to do a low-level format. And you coulda made yourself some disks capable of holding a whopping *two megabytes!* > > BTW, the floppy drives I have don't send any interrupt when I insert a > disk, so automounting is a non starter. Maybe the newer USB external > floppy drives do, dunno, but I'm not tempted to try one. Possibly. Thing is, the spec for floppies which plugged into PC clones didn't really allow for any kind of notification. It just plugged into an MFM controller, which swept the read/write head around to the commands of the host machine. I do know that the USB drives make assumptions about floppy sector/track layouts, which I found to be a bit of a bummer. -- :wq
