RF542C 5.25" external floppy information?

[LoadWB]

Digging through some more boxes I found my (prized) 5.25" floppy drive.  Natively, the system sees this drive as being able to format 880k, and it automatically senses disk changes.  With a mountlist entry from my 1.3 days this drive could do a little more (about a full MB, IIRC.)

I cannot find any information on this drive after a quick peek around.  I want to use this to read some PC 5.25" floppies, and maybe disks from other systems (like my TI-99/4A and CP/M -- the 1541 disks are read on a modified 1020.)

Anyone have any information on this bad boy?

[spirantho]

Hi,
I'm afraid I can't offer much help with reading those disk images with an Amiga 5.25" drive (though I do have one) - it'd need special software because PC HD drives run at 360 rpm instead of 300 rpm, and TI-99/4(A) disks are FM encoded, not MFM. As for CP/M - that's not a disk format, that's a filesystem. CP/M machines can use any number of different floppy styles. I once wrote a CP/M disk image for my Triumph Adler Alphatronic PC , using a (Windows) PC, I had to try about 40 different formats!

What I can say is that if you have a PCI slot spare, and have enough cash to buy a Catweasel and a PC 5.25" drive, you can read and write all those formats, but you'll possibly have difficulty using a native Amiga drive.

[LoadWB]

Hi,
I'm afraid I can't offer much help with reading those disk images with an Amiga 5.25" drive (though I do have one) - it'd need special software because PC HD drives run at 360 rpm instead of 300 rpm, and TI-99/4(A) disks are FM encoded, not MFM. As for CP/M - that's not a disk format, that's a filesystem. CP/M machines can use any number of different floppy styles. I once wrote a CP/M disk image for my Triumph Adler Alphatronic PC , using a (Windows) PC, I had to try about 40 different formats!

Bah, I had not realized the PC 5.25"s run faster as I was just caught in the PC0:-mindset.  As for the TI, I have some hope for the Amiga as it can read GCR (1541) disks with special software (and drive modification,) and there is software for the PC which will read TI disks (from DOS/Win9x.)  And as for CP/M, I realize there is a plethora of formats from different vendors, but the flexibility of the Amiga and that the 1571 and 1581 can read various formats is still encouraging.  Again for the PC, there is/was a program called 22disk which would read over 100 different CP/M formats.

What I can say is that if you have a PCI slot spare, and have enough cash to buy a Catweasel and a PC 5.25" drive, you can read and write all those formats, but you'll possibly have difficulty using a native Amiga drive.

Meh, I have an ISA Catweasel and probably a machine to support it.  I have been meaning to take this old tower I have and put a load of Windows XP on it with the Catweasel and a number of different tape drives, a Jaz, SyQuest, 5.25" drive, and a couple of others to have a data recovery station.  I run across odd media every not and then that customers ask if the data can be retrieved.

I have seen the Amiga drive system do some pretty neat stuff before, so I am not quick to count it out.  Though a Catweasel would make the most sense.  I actually have a project on the back burner right now to pull data from several boxes of customer 5.25, 3.5, and Zip disks.

[spirantho]

Yes, the Amiga can read all those formats (not certain about the 360rpm bit though), but it would require special coding.

If you need something adding to the Catweasel support, let me know, and I can try and put in support. I'm always looking for new formats to implement - I've already done the common ones!