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Modern USB to Floppy adapters that are NOT do-all

So I have the drive open , and even though it looked similar, it is not the same. This drive has a USB controller integrated. In any case still a great drive for what it is.

Ok so it's not allowing my images due to size limits and can't resize them like the old forum... Ill Throw them up elsewhere if wanted.

Chipset is jupiter2 ic8565721 for which I can find no datasheet.
 
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Hi- Thanks for the info posted in this thread. I have an older pc mobo which finally died and I had replace. It had a floppy controller on it tho and I have a teac dual 5.25/3.5 drive which I haven't really used but still have some media I want to review and possibly retain.

So I did some searching and found there are plenty of cheap look-alike USB floppy controllers/adapters out there. I ordered one but found it did not work. I don't see a mfg name, but I assume they all come from the same factory in China somewhere.

Floppy Drive To USB Adapter Board With Power Cable 1.44MB 3.5inch USB Cable​

www.walmart.com

Floppy Drive To USB Adapter Board With Power Cable 1.44MB 3.5inch USB Cable - Walmart.com

Buy Floppy Drive To USB Adapter Board With Power Cable 1.44MB 3.5inch USB Cable at Walmart.com
www.walmart.com

Lesson: These have USB-A connectors... I tried an adapter to USB-header on the mobo after splitting the plug with a Y adapter to the header than an adapter from that to USB-A. I could see a USB device which was not working with errors in Windows 11. The adapter seems to have been a problem, so I would NOT recommend this following adapter from amazon at this time for internal connections to the motherboard SATA header:

10cm Motherboard USB 2.0 Adapter Cable A Female to Dupont 9 Pin Female Header Motherboard Cable Cord USB Header to USB Cable (0.1M), Black​

Amazon.com: BAIRONG 10cm Motherboard USB 2.0 Adapter Cable A Female to Dupont 9 Pin Female Header Motherboard Cable Cord USB Header to USB Cable (0.1M), Black : Electronics

Amazon.com: BAIRONG 10cm Motherboard USB 2.0 Adapter Cable A Female to Dupont 9 Pin Female Header Motherboard Cable Cord USB Header to USB Cable (0.1M), Black : Electronics
www.amazon.com

Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)A request for the USB device descriptor failed.

So I got the USB-A plugged into a USB hub I had set up in my front panel (although it's a USB 3.0, I can't reach the USB 2.0 ports on back of the pc. I wonder maybe if power could be an issue, but doesn't seem to be). Rebooted and then I was able to see a floppy drive in Windows 11 at least and no USB device errors on the boot:

"TEAC USB UF00x USB Device"

But I can't access either of the drives/disks either.

C:\Windows\System32>dir a:\The system cannot find the path specified.
C:\Windows\System32>dir b:\The system cannot find the path specified.

I have a dual teac floppy device ... 5.25/3.5 combined unit. I learned through more reading that these apparently require more electronics than is built into these USB floppy controllers? I get different errors trying to access A: and B: drives. The drive has external power and lights up fine when I insert disks. The issue seems to be lack of support from the floppy controllers. I need to check just how badly I need 5.25 support yet... maybe I can do without.

Q: I see mention on this Greaseweazel controller here, and I see a v3.1 out there on ebay. It seems to support a lot of different formats. I just need standard floppy formats, but I need something extra. Anyone know if that controller or some other USB/floppy controller supports the dual disk teac devices as well?

Unit now is unusable right now, but noticed there are plenty of USB 3.5" external drives out there for around $20. So maybe I have to abandon any thoughts of accessing my 5.25" floppies yet but can still go through my 3.5" at some point.

Thanks for any info/leads.
 
Those cheap USB adapters only support one 3.5" HD drive. Dual floppy drives appear as two separate drives to the controller.

A good summary of your options for 5.25" disks are here. It is important to note that with flux readers (Greaseweazle etc), you cannot directly access the files via Windows. There are extra steps/software required to image the disk and then extract the files. If you don't mind that, then Greaseweazle should work with your dual drive.

If most of your files are on 3.5" HD disks, a USB floppy drive will be the easiest and most convenient option. If you have 3.5" DD disks (720K), you will need an older USB drive that also supports DD like the TEAC FD-05PUW (also sold as the "Mad Dog" MD-ED1F).

Alternatively, if you are willing to replace the motherboard, the Supermicro H8SMI-2 is relatively modern (2011) and supports two floppy drives including 5.25" HD/DD.
 
This thread makes me woozy.

Almost six years later there's been no real solution other than the field of flux imagers got larger and Chuck's dead.
 
I have no idea what all would be required to make it work well, but surely it would be possible to use the flux imaging device to get a disk image and then mount that image as a virtual drive?

The best case would be if you could just insert a disk and have that happen seamlessly...
 
Plasma said:
Those cheap USB adapters only support one 3.5" HD drive. Dual floppy drives appear as two separate drives to the controller.

A good summary of your options for 5.25" disks are here. It is important to note that with flux readers (Greaseweazle etc), you cannot directly access the files via Windows. There are extra steps/software required to image the disk and then extract the files. If you don't mind that, then Greaseweazle should work with your dual drive.

If most of your files are on 3.5" HD disks, a USB floppy drive will be the easiest and most convenient option. If you have 3.5" DD disks (720K), you will need an older USB drive that also supports DD like the TEAC FD-05PUW (also sold as the "Mad Dog" MD-ED1F).

Alternatively, if you are willing to replace the motherboard, the Supermicro H8SMI-2 is relatively modern (2011) and supports two floppy drives including 5.25" HD/DD.
Click to expand...
Who wouldn't want to feed their diskettes to a mad dog!
 
Istarian said:
I have no idea what all would be required to make it work well, but surely it would be possible to use the flux imaging device to get a disk image and then mount that image as a virtual drive?
Click to expand...
Yes this is already possible, it's just extra steps so less convenient.

Istarian said:
The best case would be if you could just insert a disk and have that happen seamlessly...
Click to expand...
There has been some work towards this with DiskFlashback, although I haven't tried it myself. Unfortunately it doesn't work with 5.25" disks yet.
 
NeXT said:
This thread makes me woozy.

Almost six years later there's been no real solution
Click to expand...

Just not enough demand. Seems like most folks want to play games, which is usually just imaging a disk, not manipulating the files on it. If folks want to save things they’ve made on the vintage hardware, they use a Gotek or one of the other hundred flash-based options.

I’m with you, I would love to have this functionality, as I still like using real disks in my disk-based systems, but I also understand why no one has taken the time to make it happen.
 
There has been various talk of adding seamless file access to some of these flux-level devices, but it is not a simple as it sounds.

Flux devices work by reading and writing an entire track at a time, that makes error detection or such much more tricky.

What if you are writing to a copy protected disk? You write to a sector and the sector right after that intentionally has an invalid sector ID. The software would either have to analyze the entire track, make the changes in memory, and then write it back hoping it does not miss any other part of the protection, or it just re-format the entire track to a standard format.

That problem does not exist with an FDC that writes a single sector, but then those devices will try to use the USB protocol that only supports 3.5" IBM PC 720k, 1.44mb, and Japanese "mode 3" disks.

Those who do deal with flux-level devices regularly deal with disks other than IBM PC formatted disks, as well as damaged disks, that need full flux imaging to work with.
 
Those are edge cases though. Most people who want direct file access just want to read the files to save them somewhere else. And if someone is writing files, it's probably not to a copy protected or damaged disk.

Non-IBM formats can be supported with a file system driver like Dokany. This is what DiskFlashback uses.
 
@SomeGuy I think approaching the problem of flux devices with a virtual floppy drive makes the most sense.

You can do ordinary reads and writes to the virtual disk and let something underneath decide when to make changes to the real media.

In fact you could just save the disk image when the disk is ejected and leave changes to real media for later. Writing a whole track at once isn't an issue once stuff is decoupled that way.

Seamless access to the drive would be nice, but likely isn't critical in most cases.

The only obvious hangup is the fundamental issue of the computer/virtual device software crashing and losing your data in a way that wouldn't be likely to happen on with real drive and controller hardware.

-----

The problems with USB floppy drives have been described/explored in the thread and do not appear to be primarily protocol issues.

Fundamentally you need a drive and hardware controller that support other media. And then you need a software driver that can handle those other formats.

The whole being wrapped up and presented as a block device would seem to be the least of these problems.
 
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