reading legacy floppy disks

[Evan Leibovitch]

Allen Taylor wrote:
>> I believe you mean 8 inch floppies.  You'd have to find someone with an
>> 8 inch floppy drive and a system that can understand the format use.
>>     
Worse than that, you need to find a controller for it as well; 8" drives 
won't have the cable headers used by 3" floppies. I don't even recall if 
they used the same spec as 5" drives (which motherboards stopped 
supporting quite some time ago). The chances of finding such a 
controller are slim, and finding it for PCI substantially slimmer (since 
the 8" floppy controller spec was out of use for quite a while by the 
time PCI cards came into use.

According to Wikipedia, there was only one source for drives supporting 
the 1M double-sided format:

"The dual-sided 1MB floppy entered production in 1975, but was plagued 
by an industry problem, poor media quality. There were few tools 
available to test media for 'bit-shift' on the inner tracks, which made 
for high error rates, and the result was a substantial investment by 
Burroughs in a media tester design that they then gave to media makers 
as a quality control tool, leading to a vast improvement in yields."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Origins.2C_the_8-inch_disk

Like I said, if you do end up being able to read these things, 
immediately go out and buy a lottery ticket.

There's a possible solution, but it's commercial; CBL Data Recovery in 
Markham. I know they've got just about every tape drive format ever 
made, maybe they can handle old floppies too.

- Evan

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