floppy disks?

[David Fletcher]

On Sun, 2019-03-10 at 20:48 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> and a 3.5" floppy. It may insert, but I'd have serious doubts the
> > ls120
> > drive could read it.
> Read, yes. Write, no.

I seem to remember writing to ordinary floppies with LS120 drives which
appeared to work OK and read back OK but only in an LS120 drive.
Perhaps the head was writing a much narrower track than an ordinary
floppy drive which couldn't then read it reliably. Whatever, it doesn't
matter now.

My experience of them though was that there never was anything super
about superdisks. More than once they corrupted backup archive files
that I expected to be safe so as far as I am concerned they were crap
and not fit for purpose. I was glad to stop using the dreadful things
when USB flash drives came along. I still have an unopened pack of
LS120 disks in the original shrink wrapping that I might just donate to
the computing museum sometime.

Back on to topic, and perhaps thinking a little "out of the box" if the
OP would care to search for PC-104 kit on eBay, item
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Motherboard-Emac-PCM-4896-1907489621-ATX-PC1
04-Bus-16-63V-Ttl-Cable-Working-
Ok/312063484253?hash=item48a86ee15d:g:ZiwAAOSwZtJW9RjA
might be of interest. It apparently has floppy, VGA and USB interfaces
so with a copy of Free-DOS or something else suitable maybe it could be
used to recover data from readable 3.5" and 5.25" floppies?

Maybe.

Dave F