5.25" floppy drive

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2010, Christoph Kukulies wrote:

> I'm in the need of reading some data from old 5.25" floppy media (1.2MB).
> I lent 2 drives from neighbour institutes at the university and after having 
> recalled that the
> floppies have to be enabled in the BIOS I'm now seeing the fd0 device in 
> dmesg (FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE).
>
> I can do a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/root/fd0.dmp
>
> The select light is lit, the head motor seems to get power but the spindle 
> doesn't spin.

Possibly a drive select issue.  Some drives had jumpers or switches, 
some cables have flipped-around wires so the connectors are specific to 
one drive or another.  If your cabling is straight-through with no funny 
business at the connectors, set the drive to DS0.  If the cable has 
split out and flipped-over sections, DS1 should be set in the jumpers 
--but then it depends on which connector is used.  ...I think, anyway, 
it's been a few years since I've had to use a 5.25.

> I tried that with two TEAC drives to no avail.
>
> Any clues what I may have forgotten? The drive is connected with the edge 
> connector and the end is open.
> Does it need to be terminated?

None that I've seen.