flash-as-floppy?

[carangil]

I've seen CF to IDE adapters, and have done that before; CF seems to last way longer than old harddrives, AND you can always swap out the card.

BUT...

Has anyone heard of a flash-to-floppy adapter? I would like something that has a floppy header on one end, and accepts a usb stick, CD card, CF, or something.

Why do I want it? 1) It would simplify copying data from a modern machine to a floppy-based machine and 2) It would make a floppy-booting setup many times more reliable to have a flash-based boot image.

 

[Chuck(G)]

More complicated than you'd think, actually. A Flash-to-IDE is more practical and far more straightforward.

Still, there was the FlashPath. But it's not a bootable solution and requires its own drivers. (I have a couple).

 

[southbird]

I've seen virtual floppy boxes on eBay that are supposedly capable of storing up to 99 floppies in (probably flash) memory and switching between them (with an LED display on front telling you what disk number you're one.) I have no experience with them, nor did I personally think that I ever really "needed" such a gizmo, but it's interesting.

 

[channelmaniac]

Once upon a time, Sony had a memory stick to floppy disk adapter.

Not sure if it required fancy drivers though.

RJ

 

[strollin]

Somewhere in my boxes of stuff I have an adapter that looked like a 3.5" floppy but had a slot on it for a Smart Media memory card. It was great in that you could stick a 64M SM card in it and use it like a 64M floppy disk. I don't recall it needing drivers but I don't think it would work in DOS either.

Found it. It's an Olympus MAFP-1U.

Oops! I see that it's the same thing that Chuck(G) posted above as the FlashPath and it did require drivers.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Once upon a time, Sony had a memory stick to floppy disk adapter.

Not sure if it required fancy drivers though.

Basically the same gizmo as the FlashPath, except that it takes memory sticks instead of SD flash. Requires its own drivers.

A little reflection will show why this is. The FlashPath (and I'm assuming that the Sony widget does also) has a simple electromagnet that sits under the floppy head when said floppy is positioned to cylinder 0. Inside is a microcontroller, a PLD and some SRAM (usually 32K) and some "glue" circuitry. The microocntroller simply energizes the magnet to commincate with the floppy controller and also "listens" via the magnet to see what the FDC is saying.

The problem is that the FlashPath has no idea where the heads of the floppy are positioned, nor which head has been selected. Indeed, it doesn't even know when the drive is selected or if the spindle motor is on.

So communication takes the form of the floppy writing a sector to send out commands and reading a sector to get the data back. Not something that your PC could boot from--unless you could fit the whole boot on one side of a single cylinder.

 

[southbird]

Bump: I did find a website where someone was once trying to write his own driver for Linux apparently before a SmartMedia driver was written: http://schou.dk/flashpath/

It has some technical details that might be interesting. I haven't located the driver, and it seems all "for Linux" sites are abandoned (like this one) or missing. I was able to pull SmartDisk's beta driver from archive.org.

Also, a post on another forum: http://www.smartergeek.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=129
... claims this to be a DOS driver for FlashPath. It's a Win 3.1 installer, so I took the liberty of running that and just pulling out the files (see attached ZIP.) "DEVICE=FLASHDSK.SYS" in CONFIG.SYS is apparently all it needs.

I don't have a FlashPath to play with it (to know if it even works, requires a 286 or whatever) but this might be an interesting way to get faux HDD support on old systems. It probably doesn't work on anything less than a 286 and/or a 1.44MB floppy drive. The directions do say "IBM/AT Compatible", so it does sound like it should at least scale back to 286. But given the limited use of actual disk tracks, I wonder if a 720KB floppy could pull it off? Because old dual floppy laptops like the Convertible is where I'd love to see this work myself.

 

[Chuck(G)]

As far as I can tell, the FlashPath (at least the one I tore down) is pretty much hard coded for 500K (1.44M) data rates. You might be able to reprogram one for the slower data rate, but the device is exceptionally difficult to get into non-destructively (my tear-down now is essentially junk, but you pay what you have to for curiosity).

So, who's going to get cracking with some drivers? (not me).