Retro computing
Nov. 14th, 2005 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothCan anyone read 360k 5.25" DOS floppies?
I've found and installed a 1.2M 5.25" floppy drive, but it declines to read any 360k floppies. (I know about the problems of writing to them with a 1.2M drive, but I should be able to read them...)
Does anyone have a DC2120 QIC tape drive that connects to the floppy or a SCSI interface?
I've found a Trakker DC2120 drive that attaches to the parallel port, but most of the ancient backups that I'm interested in browsing were done with PC Tools' backup program which used a different data format (for good reasons) from the standard and wants its tape drives to be SCSI or connected to the floppy interface.
(For people under 40 :) before writeable CDs came along to the consumer market - the blanks were well over a tenner each at first, and the drives cost many hundreds! - the 'affordable' backup solution involved small tape cassettes that would hold 60M, later increased to 120M, of data. Anyone who ever had to back up onto floppy disks thought they'd gone to heaven... a hard drive you could afford would fit onto at most a couple of these, with compression, rather than several hundred floppies.)
I've found and installed a 1.2M 5.25" floppy drive, but it declines to read any 360k floppies. (I know about the problems of writing to them with a 1.2M drive, but I should be able to read them...)
Does anyone have a DC2120 QIC tape drive that connects to the floppy or a SCSI interface?
I've found a Trakker DC2120 drive that attaches to the parallel port, but most of the ancient backups that I'm interested in browsing were done with PC Tools' backup program which used a different data format (for good reasons) from the standard and wants its tape drives to be SCSI or connected to the floppy interface.
(For people under 40 :) before writeable CDs came along to the consumer market - the blanks were well over a tenner each at first, and the drives cost many hundreds! - the 'affordable' backup solution involved small tape cassettes that would hold 60M, later increased to 120M, of data. Anyone who ever had to back up onto floppy disks thought they'd gone to heaven... a hard drive you could afford would fit onto at most a couple of these, with compression, rather than several hundred floppies.)