[vcf-midatlantic] USB Floppies that are flexible? Cleaning a 3.5" drive?

[Jameel Akari]

There are PCI SATA boards out there.  I think I have a Promise one. Bootable BIOS. That’s in a HP Pentium-4 machine, but I’d think a K6 era machine wouldn’t have trouble with drive sizes either.

I might get me one of these Greaseweasels...

-- 
Jameel Akari 

> On Dec 8, 2020, at 12:12 PM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Bill - I was thinking Win 2000 for my K6-3+ system;  I wasn't sure
> if that was too far away from DOS to be able to read the various formats
> but i'll give it a go as well..
> 
> (I can refresh myself on how to dual boot older OSes.. though I'd really
> like to somehow shoehorn a modern SATA SSD into this system that only has
> IDE / PCI slots)
> 
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 11:59 AM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic <
>> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
>> 
>> IMHO there is no modern solid USB substitute for the 720K disk drive, for
>> both software and hardware reasons.  I'd set up a "tweener" PC for this
>> kind of work that has an actual 3.5" drive installed and an OS like Windows
>> 2000.  You can also install a 5 1/4" drive..
>> Bill
>> 
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 10:00 AM John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic <
>> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hey folks,  two asks -- I'm looking for advice:
>>> 
>>> Are there any USB or external floppy drive arrangements that are flexible
>>> like internal floppy drives for allowing formatting and/or reading of
>>> unusual sector sizes or formats?
>>> 
>>> Ex:  800KB Atari ST floppies and PC DOS disks formatted in unusual sizes
>>> 
>>> ..
>>> 
>>> Second question is -what is the easiest way to clean the heads on a 3.5"
>>> floppy?   If I have a bunch of 'suspect' floppies that I want to clean
>> the
>>> head between every disk it seems a little painful to disassemble the
>> drive
>>> enough to see the heads and clean.  Are there any alternatives?
>>> 
>>> (I'm used to 5.25" drives where there's often enough space in there to
>> wipe
>>> without disassembly).
>>> Maybe there's a good (modern) source of 3.5" cleaning floppies?
>>> 
>>> (P.S.  I have a K6-3+ PC I can put a fresh OS on so I may be cleaning a
>>> legacy 3.5" drive instead of a USB floppy).
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> John
>>> 
>>