• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Help on IBM 8' Floppy/Drive

rjdecosta

New Member
Joined
Feb 3, 2005
Messages
3
Our company restores data for litigation purposes and we have been provided data that resides on an old IBM 8” diskette. I am trying to determine what type of drive will read this floppy (and then try to find and purchase it.) The details on the floppy are as follows:

IBM Diskette 2D
p/n 1669045

1024 Bytes

Is anyone familiar with this floppy/drive?
 
sorry that post should read 8 inch floppy (not 8 foot)...

sorry that post should read 8 inch floppy (not 8 foot)...

ha
 
Trouble is, you need to know what kind of machine the disk was written on, and sometimes, what particular program the data belongs to (WordStar, etc). With any luck, the disk was written on a CP/M machine, which uses a fairly standard format for 8" media. The CP/M FAQ has some useful information on jacking-in an 8" drive to a PC:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/CPM-faq/

--T
 
I'm assuming that the "1024" indicates 1024 bytes/sector, which would mean that it isnt the standard CP/M "distribution format", aka IBM 3740 format, which is 128 bytes/sector, 77 tracks, 26 sectors, single-sided, single density (FM-encoding). You'll almost surely have to find out what kind of machine it was written on, then find one of those machines to read it on. If you do manage to get a PC set-up with an 8" drive, you may be able to read the disk with a program like 22DISK. You can d/l a copy from Gaby's website www.gaby.de .
Can you determine whether it's a single-sided or double-sided disk? (How many index holes are there?) Also, you'll need to determine whether it's soft-sectored, or hard-sectored. Good luck, and lemme know if you need any more help. Oh yeah, BTW, can you post a picture of the disk?

--T
 
Back
Top