5.25" floppy drive

[Christoph Kukulies]

  Thanks to all.

Solved.

It was a multiple cause issue:

1st: BIOS Setting was incorrect (had to enable 1.2MB 5.25 rather than 
3.5 which was it set to - an oversight in the firts place, that occured 
to me).


2nd: Cable issue: I had a combined cable (3.5 " connector at the end and 
edge connector second but last.


3rd:  in combination with 2nd: DS0 jumper issue.


Anyway, I found a cable that had two edge connectors.

In the end it turns out that the floppies that were lying in a drawer 
for 19 years, are producing read errors.
I also learnt about fdcontrol. Floppy interface has changed 
significantly since Joerg Wunsch and Bruce Evans
worked on them in the early FreeBSD days back in 1995 :)


--
Christoph


Am 01.10.2010 19:18, schrieb 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.
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