Want to Borrow/Buy: Floppy drives & imaging hardware

[coldacid]

Preferably from someone in the Toronto area, or at least between Toronto and Kingston. I don't have all that many disks to image, so I'd much rather borrow someone's stuff than buy it, but for a reasonable price (by which I mean NOT the $300+ prices I see for individual floppy drives) I'm willing to purchase disk drives, at least.

[bdb]

I've owned 4 different imaging "solutions" over the years and sold off my 100+ USD KryoFlux, because it was a pain to use the command line interface to write disks back (and this feature was essentially a undiscussed one).

My $99 USD CBM device SuperCard Pro by Jim Drew never worked consistently, i.e., I had to install and reinstall the software each time I wanted to use it. I'm still not sure it even functions because of this.

I have a DrawBridge arduino based USB floppy that does light jobs nicely and works as an Amiga floppy with WinUAE.

I just built 3 GreaseWeazle boxes (version 4 device with a Sony MPF920 floppy, connecting cables in a 3D case). These work well for archival purposes (one is a permanent fixture on my desk) and work with WinUAE like the DrawBridge. The GreaseWeazle is the least expensive to put together and has good GUI software.

I'd go this route if I were you, and would lend you one, or do your archiving if I lived in Canada and not Indiana.

[ElectroBlaster]

Big thumbs up for the Greaseweazle! join that up with a cheap working pc disk drive and you are all set to go

These Greasweazle devices are cheap and work great!

I have every kind of disk image device going and the Greaseweazle pretty much is the best and the cheapest you can get. They can even write IPF protected images back to disk using G-Copy.

Also another great thing is being able to use Winue with it and then, what I do is use ADFWriter. This way I can preserve the way disk was labelled, 99% of the time. The 1% I have to give it a name but it also means I can see whats on the disk. The Greaseweazle will also work with X-Copy via Winuae which is another good way to repair dodgy disks! have had pretty good success with this method by copying the disk over to a blank adf directly.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by bdb

My $99 USD CBM device SuperCard Pro by Jim Drew never worked consistently, i.e., I had to install and reinstall the software each time I wanted to use it. I'm still not sure it even functions because of this.

What version of Windows are you using? The USB is controlled by FTDI drivers and has nothing to do with my software. If you don't have the proper drivers installed (or they are replaced by other programs - not uncommon when loading drivers for cheap/knock-off FTDI chips) you can definitely have issues with the driver. The software itself is very simple VB6 code with nothing else required.

You might go to www.ftdichip.com and get the latest FTDI drivers for the version of Windows you are using.

[tommywiz]

The problem with drawbridge is finding a compatible floppy drive.