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Floppy Disk / Diskettes // retrocmp / retro computing

61 points

by rbanffy

5 days ago

| past

| 7 comments

| retrocmp.de

| HN

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nticompass

2 days ago

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As a kid (ok, as an adult too), I knew what the "CH" on floppies meant. I was curious, but never asked or tried looking it up.

I forget when, but one day, it dawned on me that it said "HD"!

I guess most of my floppies had their labels on in such a way that the flap/door was facing down, so it said "CH". To read "HD," then the label would be upside down.

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jmclnx

2 days ago

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One thing I really miss with flash drives, a write protect switch.

Yes, I can mount 'ro', but many (all?) Linux Desktops mount the drive write through its GUI. I have aliases for mounting and never used the pointy-clicky mount in DEs.

FWIW, I am usually in fvwm or cwm, depending on screen size, so I mount 'ro' when I want to. But a hw switch on flash drives would have been nice :)

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mrob

2 days ago

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With the default ext4 filesystem, mounting 'ro' doesn't actually prevent writes to the disk. For that you need 'noload' too, to prevent journal replay. This can result in a broken filesystem if it wasn't unmounted cleanly, although assuming it's 100% read-only it shouldn't do any permanent damage (perhaps enforce read-only access at the block device level to be sure).

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c22

2 days ago

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You might like: https://www.kanguru.com/products/kanguru-ss3

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torgoguys

2 days ago

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Using an SD card (or micro SD in an adapter) connected to a USB reader might meet your needs. You can then use the SD write protect switch.

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jhallenworld

2 days ago

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I thing I learned only recently is that the write protect switch on the SD card is not an electrical switch connected to anything in the SD card itself: it just hits a lever in the SD socket that opens a contact closure and it's up to the system (hardware and software both) to bother to look at it. So on many systems the write protect switch doesn't even work.

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buildsjets

2 days ago

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A trivia not touched on in the article - IBM 5 1/4" floppy drives had dual heads and could read the front and back side of a disk without flipping. For cost savings Apple ][ drives had only one head so you had to flip the disk occasionally. But to convert an IBM 5 1/4" floppy for dual sided used on an Apple, you had to cut a second write-protection notch, either with scissors, and xacto-knife, a hole punch, or with a dedicated "drive doubler" puncher.

https://atariprojects.org/2019/06/28/make-floppy-disks-doubl...

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wlindley

2 days ago

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The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided. Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!

See IBM advert, https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-10_OCR/page/n111/mo...

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layer8

2 days ago

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Same for the C64 floppy drive (1541).

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ochrist

2 days ago

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I still have a few floppy disks packed away at the loft, but I wonder if they still work the next time I turn on my BBC or Archimedes.

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Tor3

1 day ago

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My collection of 5 1/4" floppies were mostly fine, after some thirty years. I think I had one or two (of very many) with read errors. 3.5" floppies though.. just about every "HD" (1.44MB) ones were a goner. The "DD" (720kB) fared much better.

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forinti

2 days ago

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The last time I checked, the only 5,25" floppies that still worked from that age were the ones in those Acornsoft covers.

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terinjokes

1 day ago

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I recently repaired an Apple II that were stored in a binder in an environment that wasn't climate controlled (for ~35 years). The 5.25" floppies had all developed a layer of stickiness, but all but one read fine once I cleaned up the drives.

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snvzz

1 day ago

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I'd suggest grabbing a greaseweazle[0] ahead of that.

0. github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/

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ionwake

2 days ago

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I just feel like tech moved so fast that in SOME ways its sad.

I just wish we could still use retro tech in some way without having to replace it.