HiFD Drive Driver/Software

[wesleyfurr]

Does anyone out there have the driver and software for a 200Mb HiFD disk drive? I picked up an internal drive some years ago on ebay (type that is missing the bezel designed to go into an IBM PC), but no disks yet. I recently managed to acquire an external Sony drive on ebay, along with some disks. Unfortunately, the plastic apparently has gotten very brittle and with some less-than-ideal packaging, the case is destroyed at the drive bezel end. Inside appears to be the about the exact same drive as the other I bought previously. Case probably wouldn't have done me much good anyway as it didn't include a power supply or cable, and for who knows what reason (perhaps because of the name "Sony"), the parallel port cable is 25-pin on the PC side and some oddball 44-pin cable on the drive side.

At any rate, thinking about tinkering with it in a machine...guessing some version(s) of Windows may natively support the drive, but a manual I found online for some model talks about software to eject and format the disks, etc. If anyone has a copy, I would be grateful!

Thanks,

Wesley

 

[gslick]

I had a couple of USB HiFD drives around the Windows 2000 development time frame and there was some work done to support them. I don't remember ever seeing any bug reports about them, which basically means they never got any real use or testing, and no one really cared about them. I wasn't aware of any native support in Windows for anything other than the USB version.

I might still have a USB HiFD drive and a 200MB disk or two. If the drive came with any software from Sony that was probably discarded when I first got the drive 20 years ago.

 

[wesleyfurr]

Definitely isn't much out there about them. If you happen to come across even the drivers for that drive, I would be interested in having them in my files collection, in case I ever run across such a drive. Or if by chance you're interested in parting with your drive...

Thanks,

Wesley