8 inch floppy drive with DOS, Windows 95, and Windows 7 via network

Finally I was able to build a PC that can read and write 8 inch floppy disks. It wasn't easy, and required a lot of time to figure things out, as well as money to buy the required hardware components.

The most modern variant of the 8 inch floppy disk has almost the exact same format as an 5 1/4 inch 1.2 MB floppy drive. However, there are 77 tracks instead of 80. Also, the PC floppy controller doesn't support sector sizes other than the standard 512 bytes.

However, I did not need to read 8 inch floppy disks in their native format, since all I had were a box of empty unformatted disks, which had been sitting on a shelf for 9 years.

In the video, I first format a floppy with Image Disk. In my experience, this program is robust with formatting and can agressively prepare the surface of an 8 inch floppy disk so that other formatting programs do not run into problems.

The second program I use is NFormat, which allows the number of tracks to be specified. This is important as the PC BIOS and the Windows 95 floppy driver can only deal with 80 track disks. When a disk is formatted as such, there will be no risk of the operating system trying to access non-existent tracks 77, 78 and 79, and therefore there is no risk of damaging the drive with DOS and Windows 95.

As long as no attempt is done to format the disk with 80 tracks, it will not lead to issues. WinImage can also read and write 8 inch disks as long as it uses the NFormat formatted 8 inch disk as a "template" for the disk image.

Near the end I show the performance of the drive while files are being copied over via Ethernet from a Windows 7 PC.

Видео 8 inch floppy drive with DOS, Windows 95, and Windows 7 via network канала FloppyDiskWorkshop