Uncreative Labs

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 3:51 am

I just came across an 8" floppy, it's of the double sided variety, i believe it's a 1.2mb or a 1.6mb one. I know driver.sys can handle it. but ANY help file only gives drive types for the standard floppy drives in Driver.sys what are types 3 thru 6 and 8 used for? and what are their types?

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

there was a text file floating around,. look in the txt files on this site
but if I recall the problem was the pinout of the drive.
it required some " figuring" to make it work
even odder are the 720k 5.25 drives.
I have a teac and could never find floppies it was really happy with. it was used for cp/m machines.

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 4:39 am

i've got the pinout problem squared away, that one wasn't that difficult, it's getting the right type in dos to show up. thats why i need the left out types supported in driver.sys

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 8:09 am

wow this forum's been dead, i found out that types 5 and 6 are for hard drives and optical disks, but what are 3 and 4, i've heard rumors that they are for the 5.25 720k variety and an 8" drive, but i can't find anywhere or anyone that can confirm it

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

the 8 inch was never supported with the ibm pc
the drives were huge.

the 5.25 720k was not eiter
it was a cp/m floppy format
I don't know why ibm supported first the ss 160 and then the ss 180 and ds 320 and ds 360 when a larger format existed.
I have a 5,.25 720k teac drive it is noisy and not too useful
same parameters as the 3.5" 720k
we could never find relaiable diskettes that we could use.

I would be willing to sell or swap it.

a 1.44 or 720k drive will work in a xt or clone as a 720k
early ibm AT 286 would NOT except as a 360.
when a controller with a bios or a compaticard ( no bios) with a driver is used it will work.

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:36 pm

not so sure bout that one, but if that's true, i'm puzzled why ibm and ms would include support for them in their dos up until 5 and maybe even 6. Even if that support was via a device driver or reconfiguring the drive thru dos. The 720 5.25 inch beast, i've encountered one of those. Worked great in dos. You had to use DSDD floppies with it but it formatted 80 track disks, the floppies could be read by a 1.2 and written on a 1.2 but the one i had, it had the same 360k to 1.2 floppy limitation, the track width. It also couldn't format 360k because of the bios itself thinking it was a 3.5 720k. Tandy dos 2.0 had support for these things though, i believe ibm dos MAY have for a while too.

8", well, still no luck there, i'm trying to come across a catweasel or something that will allow me to do that, otherwise i may just HAVE to make an adapter that uses the 37pin on the origional floppy controller, or get really creative with a cable

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:40 pm

i myself am very hesitant to ship anything computer related. i KNOW how ups, fedex, and the usps handle ALOT of packages. I work on an airport and have seen it all