USB floppy disc?

Hello!

I have a USB floppy drive. Plugging it into a Beagle gives a SCSI Zip icon (how’s that for a geek mindscrew?) as expected, but it always reports that the drive is empty. Tried plugging in and then inserting a disc, plus inserting the disc and then plugging in.
Disc is FAT format, I know these USB thingies don’t like anything else.

Info:
USB device 8 1 7 0/0 Mitsumi Mitsumi USB FDD

Devinfo:
USB release 0110
Class 00
Sunclass 00
Protocol 00
Max packet size 10
Vendor ID 03EE
Product ID 6901
Device ID 0100
.# configs 1
Manufacturer ‘MITSUMI ’
Product ’MITSUMI USB FDD ’
Serial number ’’

ConfInfo:
Configs 1
Config value 1
Name ’’
Attributes Bus powered
Max power 500mA

Interface 0.0 class 8.4:0 ’’
1 IN Bulk 64 bytes 0 frames
2 OUT Bulk 64 bytes 0 frames
3 IN Interrupt 2 bytes 255 frames

[sorry for no cut/paste, writing on PC copying from itty-bitty s-video preview window ;-) ]

Is there a problem with the drive, or is this something currently ‘unsupported’?

Best wishes,

Rick.

I suspect USB floppies are ‘unsupported’. It looks like some code exists for handling them in SCSISoftUSB, but I have no idea whether anyone’s put any effort into making sure it all works properly (probably not, since USB floppies are useless for reading FileCore formats).

Seem to remember Raik hooking up his USB floppy drive but I could be wrong (I usually am!)

I wrote a reply. Stupid forum told me I had to log in after I had already logged in and posted two messages (gee, can’t it set a cookie or something?). In the process, the reply was thrown away. Logging in took me away from here, and using the browser’s back refreshed this page and told me… I had to log in. Grrrr…! [not the first time this has happened either; you’d have thought there would be provision of some sort to not arbitrarily trash user data that is subsequently unrecoverable]

My message… um… it’s 7am, bedtime, I don’t remember all of it, the only point worth repeating is to say it is sad that these USB floppies don’t run on some sort of hackable microcontroller, for the hardware (interface and disc drive both) can support a variety of non-DOS formats. It’s just the lump in the middle that is incapable. Also sad is that the lump does a number of functions involved with direct FDC interfacing (akin to the 1770, etc) so it isn’t quite feasible to say “sod it” at shove a fast Atmel chip in its place…

^A ^C, fingers crossed!

Hi Rick, so basically you’re saying that even if you write a driver for a standard slimline USB floppy, it would only work in dos format due to the firmware on its controller chip? Pity. It would still be great to get a R-pi driver for USB floppy though…

would only work in dos format due to the firmware on its controller chip?

There was some related discussion on c.s.a.hardware last year (July 2011). I don’t know what Google have done with the reorganisation of “their” Groups lately, so I’m having difficulty pasting a URL, but the thread was titled “HxC Floppy Emulator”. HTH.

Is anyone seriously going to make use of DOS-formatted floppy discs, on RISC OS, via a USB floppy drive?

I thought use of floppy discs had pretty much died out, even in native formats. DOS floppies have died out to such an extent that new PCs have been supplied without floppy drives for several years.

Well, it might be useful for someone who still has a working RISC OS 3.1 or earlier machine, at least one without a network interface or CD burner, who wants to transfer files to or from it…

I agree floppy is pretty much dead as a medium. Even as a software preservation tool or for retro gaming on Acorns, the dos-only USB devices are limited. But as Ben mentions the R-pi RISC OS release will get a lot of people digging old Arcs and their software from lofts. Like the retro products for the BBC it would be good to have tools ready to image their discs and preserve anything decent that’s out there. Current USB floppys help you transfer files from floppy-only Arc’s to PC’s and back with dos format floppys but don’t help if the Acorn computer is dead and someone wants to load an E-format floppy on their R.pi.

Slightly off topic but having got RISC OS on my RaspberryPi I started hunting for ways to transfer files from my PC. The USB Floppy doesn’t work as mentioned above but I did find that an old USB 100MB Zip drive does. Using a FAT16 formated 100MB ZIPdisc I now have a transfer route :-) All I need now is to find a way of reading the copious numbers of E-format discs I still have from my A310 days into the PC!

Surely a pen drive (up to 2Gbyte) is a useful transfer medium?

You are correct of course :-}

Another idea would be to use FTP. That’s how I transferred >1.44MB files from my A4000 to the BB.

Surely a pen drive (up to 2Gbyte) is a useful transfer medium?

Depends upon the vintage of the computer in question. My RiscPC has no USB, my desktop PCs don’t speak ADFS.

In a solution similar to patric, I ran Samba on the RiscPC, logged into the share, and just draggy-droppied the files across to a USB pen drive (so yes, that came in useful too!). I was rather taken aback by how slow a 10mbit network link is. I mean, it was no big deal in the days when I used my RiscPC a lot as the files weren’t big. Now I’m used to shifting a 320MiB video file in a minute or two, it was quite jarring to see Windows’ famously inaccurate time estimation go up and up and up… and yes, it took a while. :-)

Update
Using a USB Floppy with the new machines has been talked about on the Acorn News group.
Using a DOS format floppy to pass info to a CNC machine.
It seems the USB Floppy disk units use the same controller chip as/was fitted to Windows-PC’s

A couple site of interest:-

http://www.kryoflux.com/
http://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller

A kryoflux driver may be possible, as you have direct access to the floppy at flux level. You’d even be able to access all those original Arc floppies.

Any regular USB (I believe) will only be able to read/write PC format floppies due to the Acorn disc geometry being incompatible.

Even though I use a flux for JASPP archiving, up until you just mentioned it I’d never considered using it directly on the Pi as a floppy drive. Essentially you’d need a 1772FDC emulator driver and have it intercept ADFS in the same way ADFFS works. The stumbling block however is that I believe the KryoFlux’s low level API is closed source and they don’t have a lot of love for the Pi or the Archimedes.

I drop them an email as one archive team to another and ask the question.

The reply should be interesting.
Being able to use a DOS floppy – is the main interest – uploading info to a CNC probably a lathe.

It seems the common USB floppy units sold use – the PC controller chip.

A interesting note from one of the above sites – might explain why a USB floppy unit – when plugged into a RISC OS machine – gave a SCSI icon on the Icon Bar.

What is the last OS update to the USB modules – or is it a softload?
*************
[Accessing USB Floppy Drives]

All USB devices, including USB floppy drives, are accessed indirectly (using SCSI-style commands encoded in USB datapackets) over the USB bus. USB floppy drives do not use any of the IO ports or FDC commands described in this article.
***************

What is the last OS update to the USB modules – or is it a softload?

It doesn’t matter what version you use, nobody’s implemented USB floppy support yet. There’s partial support for them in SCSISoftUSB (hence it the floppy showing up on the iconbar as SCSI/Zip drive), but it doesn’t work.