My current Linux box doesn't have a floppy drive, though I
do have a USB floppy drive.  I've had no problems working
with floppies that have already been formatted, but have
been unable to figure out how to get fdformat (and other
floppy utilities) to work on the USB floppy drive.  Is
it even possible?  Does fdformat/fdutils require a "real"
(i.e. connected to the motherboard floppy controller) floppy?

My ultimate goal is to be able to create 3.5" DSDD that a
TRS-80 CoCo can read.  People have created the necessary
setfdprm configs to format the disk properly, but like
I said, I can't get any of the floppy stuff to recognize
the USB floppy.

Thanks!

--
Rich Carreiro                            rlc-n...@rlcarr.com

I don't know, I don't have any USB drives.

One thing, fdformat seems to get information about how it
should format from the device name it is used with, and if
you have to point to something other than one of the /dev/fd*
devices, there may be a problem there.

Since you can create an image that can then be copied to
a floppy with dd, then doing something like creating a file
that has the proper format, and then dd'ing it to the floppy
should work.

Open the computer and see if there's a connector for the
floppy drive.  I don't know if those have completely disappeared,
or if computers simply don't include the actual drive.  Then
connect a floppy to it, even hanging off the side of the computer
if this is temporary.

   Michael

Michael Black staggered into the Black Sun and said:

My notes say to check out
http://www.geocities.jp/tedi_world/format_usbfdd_e.html , but this may
or may not work depending on what you need to do.

Um, no.  dd won't work in this case because the disks that a TRS-80 used
have a different physical format (different number of tracks, different
numbers of sectors per track) than the standard 80 tracks, 2 heads, 18
sectors/track that a normal 1.4M floppy has.  In general, most USB
floppy drives that I've seen will refuse to recognize disks that aren't
in that physical format.  This is because floppies are a dead medium and
the goal of a USB floppy drive is to be as cheap as possible.

34-pin connectors are still fairly common on x86 motherboards.  They
have disappeared from the smaller boards, and soon they'll start
disappearing from the larger boards.

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