What's happening here?!

[gdement]

Re: What's happening here?!

I have seen drives with no keys, keys on both sides and even silkscreening that marks pin 1 on THE WRONG SIDE.
It makes me miss 5 1/4" drives, you can't possibly screw up connecting them unless you try really hard.

Floppy cabling is a joke. Many of my drives seem to be keyed both ways, which is pointless. Most of my cables don't have a shroud type key at all, but some of them have different pins missing. Some motherboards omit the key pins, others leave them in there. I have to go through my cables and find one that physically fits the particular board and drive. Then I guess how to connect it at random until it works.

I have 1 modern single-connection keyed floppy cable, I recently saw it and figured "wow, that'll be easier to use!" I couldn't get it to work. Back to the 5 connector monstrosity.

[gdement]

Re: What's happening here?!

And ya know....i never had problems reading the old 5.25" disks......now 3.5", thats another story.

They work a lot better if you format them as 720KB, instead of that ridiculous 1.44MB format. You can even reformat a faulty 1.44MB disk at 720KB and it will work again. Just cover the left hole and it will be detected by the drive as a 720KB disk. 1.44MB depends on unrealistic tolerances and never should have been standardized.

I think the Japanese have some in between format, something like 1.0MB. I wonder how well that works.

[kc8adu]

Re: What's happening here?!

dont get me started on the poor quality of floppy disks and drives.
those pretty multi color slices of shit memorex sells are the worst.
lots of industrial stuff still uses floppies.
like swi m,mx,lx series cnc gear.
i still have some 3m 1.44 on hand to make things like prototrak bootdisks but looks like i will
need to look for old dusty stock to get good ones.

[willawake]

Re: What's happening here?!

sony diskettes are shit also
verbatim are iffy, they used to be good

the thing that bugs me is when a drive is not reading a disk made by another drive. goddamn waste of time like 1 hour just to finally make a disk that works for the F6 drivers and nice mood for the rest of the windows install

[Per Hansson]

Re: What's happening here?!

dont get me started on the poor quality of floppy disks and drives.
those pretty multi color slices of shit memorex sells are the worst.
lots of industrial stuff still uses floppies.
like swi m,mx,lx series cnc gear.
i still have some 3m 1.44 on hand to make things like prototrak bootdisks but looks like i will
need to look for old dusty stock to get good ones.

And isn't it just lovley when you push that floppy in and you hear a scratch sound as it tries to spin and you pull it out and it's full of misc industrial cutting goo?

Makes one wonder why they put normal fucking floppy drives in most industrial machines when better alternatives must exist (more durable I mean)

Normally we use LAN for all transfers, but I wanted to move some cutting conditions from one machine to another, of course it did not like to save it to anything but a floppy...

That floppydrive had not been used for the whole life of the machine ofcourse, I was able to write it. But the other machine (an Adige 702D tubelaser) that I wanted to read it with literally filled the floppydisk with cutting dust!

I blew some cmpressed air in the floppydrive and a giant cloud of cutting dust came out of it, sigh

Then I took an old trusty pencil and paper

[WNG]

Re: What's happening here?!

Why do we still have floppies? The 3.5" should be relegated to history.
Listening motherboard manufacturers???
Bootable USB/flash is the logical replacement. We already have bootable optical.

The only reason I can think of for keeping it in new systems is that 3rd world countries may still be using it due to cost.

[Spacedye69]

Re: What's happening here?!

Our Adige tube saws will only save to LAN. WOOT for new machines!!!!

[kc8adu]

Re: What's happening here?!

one truss plant i fix mitek cybersaws for disconnected the lan and forced the operator to get off his dead ass and go to the office for jobs on you guessed it...1.44 floppy.
the operators were surfing porn sites and knew enough about computers to do it no matter what i did.
reached up 15 feet and cut the line.
removed the nic.
no more spyware crashing the box.

[gdement]

Re: What's happening here?!

sony diskettes are shit also
verbatim are iffy, they used to be good

the thing that bugs me is when a drive is not reading a disk made by another drive. goddamn waste of time like 1 hour just to finally make a disk that works for the F6 drivers and nice mood for the rest of the windows install

If it'll fit, that's something else which is fixed by going to 720KB. I've never had problems between drives at that density.

[Per Hansson]

Re: What's happening here?!

one truss plant i fix mitek cybersaws for disconnected the lan and forced the operator to get off his dead ass and go to the office for jobs on you guessed it...1.44 floppy.
the operators were surfing porn sites and knew enough about computers to do it no matter what i did.
reached up 15 feet and cut the line.
removed the nic.
no more spyware crashing the box.

That is also a good point, plus you don't have to fear network born viruses and shit...

I keep installing the Windows 2000 updates on the Mazak FG300 tubelaser I operate, it's quite akward with the built in MDI keyboard :P