a noble cause

[ebtb.livejournal.com]

OK - this is either the dorkiest email or the coolest email I have ever received since I have been here. Enjoy:

Do you have any special option settings to do this really tricky task??:
I have some floppys from my Dad's old Atari 520ST and I am trying to read them. As far as I know they were double density but only single sided (360K disks).
Any ideas short of buying an old Atari on Ebay?

Do I help this guy without asking why he wants to do this? LOL

Comments

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Heh. Years ago, I busted my ass trying to get an Apple II external drive and drive card (NuBus I think) to work in an old Mac, so that a student could recover some paper's she'd written in Junior high. What the hell, it was fun (ended up finding a prof with an old Apple II that worked and could print to impact printer.) and killed time on a slow summer.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

There yoosta be a thing you could plug into the cartridge port on an Atari ST and it would boot Mac OS. I am not making this up.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Damn! That would be cool!

[dazzedelf.livejournal.com]

I'd help him. Might discover an old infocom game!

[adamjaskie.livejournal.com]

Maybe he has some old data he needs to get? IIRC, there are projects out there for hooking an Atari drive to a PC via the parallel port, in order to use it with Atari emulation software. That would probably be a better solution than buying an old Atari, if all he wants to do is get some old papers or something off the disks.

[flainn.livejournal.com]

Sweet.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Assuming (and this is a helluva assumption) the disk is still good, I think you'd be able to read it in just about any 5&1/4 drive. The trick would be recognizing the file system. I'm pretty sure linux has one.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

For the record, the ST (a 16-bit box running on a 68000 chip) used 3 1/2s. But I think they were a fonkay format, although I'm not sure of that.

[anamacha.livejournal.com]

Do I help this guy without asking why he wants to do this? LOL

question is, CAN you do it without needing to know what for?

[jadeshadow.livejournal.com]

Ask him. Curiosity may kill the cat, but the cat's bound to have an interesting time getting killed.

I'd think that the disks would be long gone by this point. But there is always hope. Chances are any 5 1/4 floppy would read them, but the trick is going to be finding a machine that reads the 5 1/4 drive. Don't attempt it on Win XP, trust me, it's not on the list of "good ideas." Then again, most things aren't good ideas when it comes to XP.

Cynically yours
~ K.

Aww DRAT

[neferde.livejournal.com]

You just had to go and spoil my plans for this weekend didn't you? And after all the basement hunting I had to do to find a 5.25" drive and my old game disks too! Well at least now I have a reason to see if I can't ressurect the old P1 in the basement now.

[jjjiii]

OK, I'll bite. What happens when you try to get XP to read a 5.25" floppy?

[xforge.livejournal.com]

The ST used 3 1/2s. We yoosta punch holes in 'em to turn 720K disks into 1.44MB disks.

[fiannnachruinne.livejournal.com]

Actually the 520st used a 360k single-sided double density floppy disk. That would make it a 3.5" drive. 720k floppies were double-sided double-density, that's 360k per side. The 5.25" disks were 360k at DSDD or 180K SSDD (like the appleII).
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=20

Therefore I would think you SHOULD be able to access the disk using any 3.5" drive on a PC. Actually reading the data is another matter since Windows won't necessarily recognize the file system. Emulation software might do it though. That's what I would try.
This doesn't sound promising though. (http://steem.atari.st/faq.htm)

Q. Why can't Steem read my ST floppy disks?

A. This is a problem for all ST emulators. The way the PC handles floppy drives is not the same as the ST, the hardware usually doesn't allow applications to read as much data on double density disks as the ST did. The only ST disks that a PC is certain to be able to read properly are the ones formatted to MS-DOS format, 80 tracks, 9 sectors per track (most TOS versions' ST desktops formatted disks this way). Unfortunately, most ST disks were bigger than this, so people could avoid spending loads of money on more disks.

The way all ST emulators get around this is to use disk images, PC files that represent an ST disk. Converting floppy disks into disk images can be a big problem; for details of the many different ways it can be done read the disk image howto.txt that comes with Steem. Generally it is easier to download disk images rather than create them. There is a comprehensive list of download sites on the links page.