Date   : Sun, 29 Mar 2009 01:21:11 +0000
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Omniflop

davidglover wrote:
> Is there such a thing as a USB 5.25" drive? Could you buy a USB 3.5"
> drive and replace the drive?
 
Unfortunately, as is common in the brain-dead, strip down all
functionality to make it dirt cheap, PC world, USB external floppy
drives translate all access commands from the computer into
accesses to DOS formatted disk systems.
 
You can't say "read 256-byte sector from track 4 sector 15". You
can only say "read from logical sector 22" and it reads 512 bytes
from track 1 sector 5.
 
> Surely that would bypass the PC's own floppy controller.
 
Yes, and by doing so bypasses almost all of the functionality of
the PC's own floppy controller.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
Youth has now fled. Their best years have been passed in the service
of the party. They are ageing and their ideals have also passed,
dispersed by the contrarities of daily struggles.