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No fun with Floppy drives in a modern world

M

markustg

Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2020
Messages
21
Location
Greenville SC
Hello all,

I want to make copies of both 720K and 1.4MB floppy disks. In particular I want to make back up copies of orgininal disks to reduce there potential loss.

Why you may ask? Becasue vintage synthesizers have these drives in them and sometimes it's just easier to load patch files from a floppy instead of the other options:

Those options are, MIDIOX, floppy emulators etc. etc. and they sometimes work brilliantly and sometimes they are a giant time waster.

So, I bought a Chuanganzhuo USB floppy drive, popped it into my WIN10 PC, and can not get it to read files, nor write disks.

(I am considering just buying a vintage PC to do this, but I don't really want a giant old PC tower sitting in the corner of my workshop gathering dust just for this one purpose)

The WIN10 PC sees the drive and will interact with it, but I keep getting error messages, even though I know the disk(s) , I have tested many ) are in working condition.

Photo 1). I see the TEAC floppy in device manager
Photo 2). The driver is the "most current" and is reported as working
Photo 3). The PC interacts with the drive in a command prompt, but it will not format, nor does it see the files that are on the disks so I can copy them to a new one

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks
 

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Have you successfully formatted and written to a blank diskette and then read that disk after? If the drive heads are dirty or damaged, the drive may not be able to read any disk.

Which synthesizer disks are you using? Some of the ones I know of use floppy formats that USB floppy drives can't read.

Note that not all drives claiming to be TEAC UF000x will handle 720 k formats.
 
Are the disks that you're using, PC/Windows format? If they're synth-specific, you have your answer--those USB drives support only about 3 different PC formats (720K (80/2/9/512) 1.3M (80/2/8/1024) and 1.44M (80/2/18/512) ). Everything else is terra incognita.

I've found that the Teac FD05PUB drives to be pretty reliable. And there are always the emulators (e.g. Gotek with flash floppy) that avoid the problem of spinning rust altogether.
 
Please note that not all USB floppy drives can support 720 kB disks. Newer ones only support 1.44 MB.

Try to get an old one from IBM Thinkpad brand era. They do.

And additionally, formatting 720 kB diskettes in a 720kb compatible drive isn't trivial as well, as Explorer graphic dialog does not support that. You have to use the command shell and type the following command:

format a: /n:9 /t:80
 
This is a great forum. So happy I found it.

Yes! The Synth disks have custom format material on them! So that may be why I can see them.

I am still puzzled as to why I can not format a standard 1.4MB floppy - that is just a blank disk.

Very helpful links!

Checking them out will report back
 
I find that any Windows version after XP has problems with floppies.

My Windows 7 machine sometimes has trouble with 1.44 MB floppies and I have to format them in a Linux machine or an older Windows 98 machine before Windows 7 will work with it.

Other times, it's just bad floppy disks. I have a pile of NOS 1.44MB floppies and have steadily had to toss them due to the media deteriorating.
 
I have two of the Chuanganzuhuo USB floppy 1.4 drives, each attached to a Win10 machine, and both are able to read from and write to floppy disks. Another brand of drive I tried earlier was not successful, so it may be partly the fault of the hardware.

I use them for "sneaker net"; when I want to transfer a file to another machine that runs DOS, for example, or to write a WinIMage file to disk. Windows 10 won't write any other format than 1.4 DSHD to the drive and due to differences in head size, electronics, magnetic media and track spacing between DD and HD disks you probably want to only use HD disks with the drive. As GiGaBiTe observes, you can format a disk elsewhere and use it in the USB drive.

Some early synths - Ensoniq ESQ1, for example - loaded and stored to tape. Is that an option?

-CH-
 
I would look to replacing the drives in the synth with a Gotek

Where are you ?, might be possible for one of us to help read your disks as we tend to have a few machines of various types.
 
When formatting the 1.44MB drive, it first checks track 0 so it can save the unformat data. If the track is bad, the disk is rejected.

You can either use a magnetic eraser of the type used to bulk erase VHS tapes to totally wipe the disk, or some versions of Windows have a /u option on the format command to not bother doing the unformat stuff.

Just looking at Win10 format command, it makes no mention of /u or unformat in the help, but you could give it a go anyway.
 
Those Chinese drives generally use whatever USB drive is available at the moment. I've got identically-branded units with NEC, Sony and Teac drives, all with differing capabilties.

In general, I don't like slimline (1/6 height) 3.5" drives--too many design compromises to get a small drive. A small "tweener" with a 1/3 height drive is still a better choice if you have to deal with real floppies.
 
I am in SC.

And I do have a Gotek 720K emulator that I will be using going forward, but I want to get the files off the old disks, and make copies of them.

I think I will fire up a win 98 or XP PC that I have and try the USB floppy as maybe its a win10 thing.

I also ordered one of those USB to internal floppy drive cards that I will be trying as well. The older internal floppy drives I have may work better than the new USB drives.
 
Mark,
The following information in the KORG X2 Manual describes the Floppy Format.

Code: 
FLOPPY DISK DRIVE

An internal 3.5" inch 2DD floppy disk drive provides a convenient way to store your Programs,
Combinations, sequencer songs, and patterns.  In addition, MIDI Exclusive data from other MIDI
devices can be stored and loaded via tbe disk drive like a MIDI data fi1er.  The X2/X3 floppy
disk format is compatible with the MS·DOS 720KB disk format, making it easy to exchange SMF
(Standard MIDI File) data with other users.


MSDOS 3.5" Format
Double Density, 512 Bytes per sector, 9 sectors per track, 80 tracks, 2 Sides, 720 KB, 300 RPM, MFM

Imagedisk Ver 1.18 or Teledisk should be able to copy the floppy(s).


Larry
 
I can tell you about an experience I had with the cheap USB floppy drives from the far east.

When I first got my IBM5155 I fitted a dual Teac 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drive to it along with a Seagate HDD. In any case the idea was I would use my "modern" albeit vintage HP Pavilion computer with an external USB floppy drive, to quickly get data in and out of the 5155. For weeks I pondered why I was having all kinds of problems, programs I transferred would not run sometimes. Things like CRC errors got reported. It seemed that files were just getting randomly corrupted but I didn't know how or where it was happening. None of the computers were reporting drive errors though.

Luckily I had put some jpeg images on the floppy, and while browsing that I noticed errors appearing in the images. The longer the floppy stayed in the cheap USB drive the worse the images got (I still have a photo of this corruption somewhere). So I opened the USB floppy drive up, I couldn't see anything obviously wrong, but it had a dodgy looking chip added in the USB interface that had its type number removed with a grinder. So the drive was corrupting data on the disk and if I had not seen a visual representation of that as a corrupted image file, it would have taken me longer to figure it out.

In any case after that I decided I would only buy vintage new old stock IBM USB drives, or Imation drives I found were great, from the year 2000 to 2004 era or thereabouts. I have had no problems since, I would never buy one of those cheap floppy drives ever again.
 
This depends entirely on the make and model of the synthesizer/sampler. I'm currently building a p-200 based desktop system with an actual 3.5 inch drive in no small part because my old W30 and VFX-SD both take specially formatted disks which can only be written on actual floppy drives. For most purposes (i.e. computers), my old Dell C600 laptop running win98 works fine, but the sensitivities of the old synths and samplers, which were themselves highly specialized computers except with much less interactivity and much less publicly available information, make it impossible to use for my devices. I also don't trust it to read valid disk images. Even if the drive can write 720k disks, it may not be capable of writing the actual formatting for your device.

Also, all of the proper tools for working with devices vintage enough to use a floppy drive were created in the 90s and often haven't been updated to work properly (or at all) on anything newer than XP.

Frankly, dumping everything via SYSEX is a better option if possible.
 
The Supercard Pro that I suggested makes a copy of the flux on a disk and doesn't need to know the formatting. It will copy bit by bit at the flux level to a second disk. The only limiting factor is using the correct drive type and correct blank diskette. A low density disk drive doesn't write well to a HD diskette. A 96 track drive won't write as wide a track as a 48 TPI disk drive. Etc.
 
markustg said:
Hello all,

I want to make copies of both 720K and 1.4MB floppy disks. In particular I want to make back up copies of orgininal disks to reduce there potential loss.

Why you may ask? Becasue vintage synthesizers have these drives in them and sometimes it's just easier to load patch files from a floppy instead of the other options:

Those options are, MIDIOX, floppy emulators etc. etc. and they sometimes work brilliantly and sometimes they are a giant time waster.

So, I bought a Chuanganzhuo USB floppy drive, popped it into my WIN10 PC, and can not get it to read files, nor write disks.

(I am considering just buying a vintage PC to do this, but I don't really want a giant old PC tower sitting in the corner of my workshop gathering dust just for this one purpose)

The WIN10 PC sees the drive and will interact with it, but I keep getting error messages, even though I know the disk(s) , I have tested many ) are in working condition.

Photo 1). I see the TEAC floppy in device manager
Photo 2). The driver is the "most current" and is reported as working
Photo 3). The PC interacts with the drive in a command prompt, but it will not format, nor does it see the files that are on the disks so I can copy them to a new one

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Does this happen with just 720k disks, or 1.44k disks as well? Many products on the market only understand 1.44k disks. I have a $12 generic USB floppy drive here that works quite well. In fact one time I accidentally left it plugged in to my Win7 system and rebooted. It actually booted from the MS-DOS 3.3 disk!

I think I may have accessed 720k disks by the ancient trick of covering the hole in the diskette body. It's been a long time and I'm not sure any more. I have an IBM Convertible lying around and it's convenient to have a couple spare 720k disks.

Actually a fair number of my 3.5" floppies have gone bad, even the Sony. :(
 
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