[deleted]
Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
We also had that fixed with CDs/DVDs when the OS could lock the drive and handle the eject button any way it liked. I didn't quite like the way Linux handled this though, not allowing the disk to be ejected as long as any file descriptors were still open, which meant you had to hunt down the processes keeping them open. But it would be extremely helpful for writable media like flash to be able to do full write-back c…
Ooh, it'd be cool if you could do the same thing for USB drives. Perhaps some sort of claw or magnetic mechanism could hold the drive in place.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Windows, they're mounted sync by default , so you can just remove them. Of course, if you do so while it's writing, you'll have a problem - though this was the same with floppies. Windows used to require you to 'eject' but doesn't any more, which I think is due to the above. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media. As far as I know this has never been enabled by default.
> It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media.
No, it's always required, because applications may be writing to the drive.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#64Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.
> Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives.
Oh, that exists! From 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath
A floppy disk drive-compatible SD card adapter. Needs special software, though.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac. I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that…
One of the things that drove me nuts using the earlier Macs at my college was the lack of an eject button. Sure, I understand the reasoning now, but when some crappy Hypercard project I was bungling made the computer freeze, I had no way to remove the floppy short of rebooting the whole computer and waiting or hunting around for a paperclip to push into the little manual eject hole.
Still, seeing how many people in my office will just pull USB flash drives without ejecting them I almost see the appeal now.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#66Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.
They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to han…
Exactly, it reminds me of the time when I formatted a HD 3.5" floppy to 2M with the aforementioned excellent 2M3.0 tool by Ciriaco García de Celis (Facultad de Ciencias de Valladolid: Grupo Universitario de Informatica). It provided 500 Kb of more available data beyond the 1.44M (more then fdformat).
From a 2M dos bootdisk I launched a stripped version of win3.1, extracted the WIN3.UC2 archive to a ramdrive of 6M or so and launched it. In this way I could edit my assignments with wysywig WRITE.EXE instead of the dos based WP51 on the library computers. People were wondering how I could have windows running as it wasn't installed.
So nowaydays we have 100000M instead of 2M in a smaller package.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#67Cute. Does anyone remember the superfloppies of the late 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superflop... ?
I used to have a LS120 SuperDisk drive in my computer. I really liked the idea but it was useless because no one else had them. I think I still have the drive and several disks stashed away somewhere.
Hey, I'm the other guy who had one, pleased to meet you after all those years! cackles
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac. I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that…
I felt my face get red hot for you when I read those last lines.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#69I would like to see the 3.5" floppy do a comeback, for instance as a 1TB+ flash drive. It is large enough that you can comfortably handle it physically and label it, maybe it could be a small throwback to the age of floppies and zip drives.
And nowadays the write back buffer could be on the device itself, and as you hit the 'eject' button it could use the power from a small capacitor to commit it to the disk. Thus no separate 'eject' in the operating system - pop it out and go.
They could replace Blu Ray with this new format, so all those sci-movies in the 80ies where there are films on floppys - those will turn out to be right.
Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac. I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that…
I hope that ~25 years later that these Internet points I grant you can ease the pain of your memory.