reading ADFS Floppy Discs

I have a number of ADFS formatted floppy discs which were created on an Acorn A410 which I no longer have.

I have tried RPCEmu (and Virtual Acorn, both on Windows XP) and have not been able to read the discs.

Does RPCEmu support reading real floppy discs?

Does RPCEmu support reading real floppy discs?

This speaks only of disc images so I think you need to make an image of the whole floppy disc and then mount that.

OK – thanks.

I did look at creating image files from the discs – but did not have any look with that, either.

Can you recommend and software to do it – on Window XP?

Can you recommend and software to do it – on Window XP

I’m afraid the only machine with a floppy drive that I have used, for quite a few years, is the old RPC.¹
I think I have a USB connected external drive for the work laptop, but the last time I used that was a Win2k rebuild of the other halfs laptop.

¹ Obviously something I need to think about to move old software to a more accessible medium.

Can you recommend and software to do it – on Window XP?

I think “OmniFlop” is one of the recommended software packages. Keep in mind that you need a “true” floppy disc, USB drives will not work. Unless you use a custom controller like KryoFlux.

Keep in mind that you need a “true” floppy disc, USB drives will not work.

Due to the differences in media format, the way you read a non-DOS format disc on a PC is by talking directly to the FDC which directly controls the drive itself.

The problem with USB floppy drives is that they contain a built-in controller which reads and understands the disc, then presents itself as a sort of removable media. You will notice that several tracks are read as the floppy is mounted, and that the floppy indicator lamp blinks like a harddisc.
Inside my USB floppy (Mitsumi D353FUE) is a “Mitsumi NCL066” which doesn’t exist according to Google. Interesting. Also a 39SF512 which is a 64KiB Flash. The other IC is an NCL063 which, judging by its position, is a stepper driver for the disc motor.
The controller built into the drive (this is the NCL066 chip in mine) is what actually reads the data from the disc. It only copes with formats that it directly understands. In the case of my drive, it understands 720KiB, 1.2MiB, and 1.44MiB¹. Anything else is simply not recognised¹. Esoteric formats are unlikely to be recognised in any USB floppy controller conforming to the UFI standard, as the three formats mentioned are the only ones documented as existing.
Since there’s no interface to the drive hardware (you can’t directly control the drive nor ask the controller chip to do anything weird for you), there is simply no possibility of using a standard USB floppy disc to read esoteric formats.

¹ http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/usbmass-ufi10.pdf, with format types in part 4.5.3 on p25.

Thanks all for the info. (Just what I needed)

Starting with an 800K floppy disc written two decades ago on an Acorn A410, I now have an image file which works as Drive 0 on RPCEmu and Drive 1 on Virtual Acorn.

I needed to set OmniFlop to save an image of type “Double Sided Interleaved (*.a)”