SCSI Floppy Drives

[landogriffin]

Hi all!!

Because I like to do crazy things.... I'm trying to use a SCSI floppy drive with my Mac (SE/30). I’m curious if anyone has ever had success getting one of these old TEAC SCSI floppy drives working with a Mac.

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My initial experiments were:
- PowerMac G4 (with Adaptec SCSI card) - even without a disk inserted, the PowerMac would just try to read the drive over and over and over. but, it would never try to boot
- SE/30 - SCSIprobe will see it, the drive spins up, but nothing beyond that.

Still lots of debugging/investigation to be done. But I wanted to throw this out there to see if anyone had tried this before.

SCSI2SD also has a floppy option, but I haven’t tried that either. Looking at the code though, there isn’t much unique functionality for its floppy functionality.

 

[landogriffin]

LONG term goal is to be able to use floppy images with RASCSI, but I wanted to see if existing solutions worked before I dig too much into this

 

[pfuentes69]

LONG term goal is to be able to use floppy images with RASCSI,

That would be amazing

 

[ScutBoy]

In a lot of Sun gear this year I got a 5 1/4" SCSI floppy drive. I've not seen one before. I can fathom how it would/could work in *nix, but anything else might be a crapshoot.

 

[landogriffin]

In a lot of Sun gear this year I got a 5 1/4" SCSI floppy drive. I've not seen one before. I can fathom how it would/could work in *nix, but anything else might be a crapshoot.

I'm thinking the same thing... but we'll see!

 

[ScutBoy]

I know a company (PLI?) make a SCSI 3.5" drive that they sold for NeXT systems, and it seems there was a Mac version as well.

PLI SuperFloppy 2.8

I have just acquired one of these drives. It's a small SCSI box wrapped around an auto eject 2.8MB floppy drive that was sold early/mid 1990s for Macs and NeXT boxes. I have not found any info on how much the two versions differed -- I suspect it was down to the software bundle. I've tried it...

68kmla.org

PLI TurboFloppy for Mac from Tom Owad on 2001-05-29 (2001-May)

 

[trag]

Back when my job intersected with PaRISC HP machines, I saw that they had an internal SCSI 3.5" floppy drive. Might be interesting if one of those could be found.

 

[landogriffin]

Back when my job intersected with PaRISC HP machines, I saw that they had an internal SCSI 3.5" floppy drive. Might be interesting if one of those could be found.

I got my hands on a TEAC branded scsi drive. But, so far my macs don’t seem to like it. I’ll have to try it out on a Linux pc this weekend!

 

[Bama]

I found this via google groups awhile back. Maybe it helps.
Also, I remember something about SCSI wanting to see this an HDD and not a FDD… it wants to write in defined blocks or similar???

: re: teac fc-1 scsi floppy on linux ? (too old to reply)

Peter L. Peres

11 years ago

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Hi all,



I was given a fc-1 and I'm trying to see if it works under linux (2.4

series kernels, aha2940uw scsi card, internal bus, automatic termination).



It is detected correcty as removable disk scsi but read and write leads to

errors. write causes 03/31/00 (during format with the aha bios utility),

and read yields 0E/14/00 (syslog dusing read attempt with dd). The error

codes above are given as sense key/code/qualifier .



Does anyone run such a drive under linux or *bsd, and if so, with what

adapter and adapter settings. Also were there problems setting it up. This

drive is suspect of being faulty.



Peter

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lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/ (Lennart Sorensen)

11 years ago

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...

According to http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/floppies.html the teac

fc-1 was designed for unix workstations, and not really as a PC floppy

drive, and thinks making it work is pretty unlikely. Some other pages

indicated programing docs for the drive says it requries a special scsi

command sent to switch into 1.44M mode.



A few hints found:

Disable HD emulation of removable drives (many adaptecs have this bios

option).

Disable disconnect on the drive (scsi bios option)

Force to 10MB/s or 5MB/s max (scsi bios option)



The commands: scsiformat, scsiinfo, scsi-config, and such may also be

helpful.



Lennart Sorensen

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The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org

 

[lilliputian]

If you can somehow track one down, early SuperDisk drives were offered in SCSI, which, in addition to reading SuperDisks (LS-120), would also be able to read standard floppies (1.4MB only). There was also apparently a Floptical drive from Iomega? Don't quote me on that one.

 

[retr01]

Even snagging a SuperDisk with SCSI interface still presents challenge to find the correct drivers for the Macintosh? I suspect only PowerPCs and beyond would be able to handle that as SuperDisk started after the release of MacOS 8?

 

[Bama]

I was looking at the link you posted to the FC-1 FDD that you purchased. The FDD drive it self has very few jumper settings. I DON’T know if matters or not but having jumpers to adjust how it interacts may also affect your compatibility. I have attached some files that I think have jumper descriptions for some of the different TEAC FC-1 FDD models.
Also, It may go without saying but the newer the FC-1 (maybe the newer the FC-1 BIOS) the more compatible these drives have been for me using OSX 10.4. I can typically format a diskette at either 640K or 1.44M. The floppy drives with the Teac FC-5 adapter seem most compatible with my Macs. The newer BIOS will allow read/write of files that can be read with an internal drive or USB drive connected to my Lombard PB.
Three more items:
1) Here is the link to a forum discussion for using the FC-1 with DOS drivers on VOGONS
2) Attached PDF for programming the FC-1
3) the Zip file of documents mentioned in the VOGONS thread is attached.

BTW landogriffin, I believe my girlfriend and I met you last year at VCF West. You sold me a few macATX power adapters.
Much Appreciated!

 

[Bama]

And another thing…
If you’re not having success with Low density diskette try a high density diskette diskette.

 

[retr01]

I was thinking about the floppy drive on the 68k Macintosh via SCSI. I realized Apple had specific requirements for a SCSI device to interface correctly with the Apple SCSI Manager, which was part of Systems 6, 7, and probably 8 and 9. The SCSI Manager had various versions to deal with updates of the SCSI hardware and specifications.

Apple discussed the SCSI Manager in the Inside Macintosh Volume IV and V books, which can be easily found as PDF files online. Apple released various developer notes to write appropriate driver programs for specific SCSI devices, such as this chapter that discusses the driver requirements.

One approach is a small PCB that can emulate it as a SCSI device known to Apple. For example, that is how BlueSCSI does as it mimics and identifies itself as a Quantum Fireball HDD that Apple's SCSI controller on the logic board and the System SCSI Manager recognizes.

 

[landogriffin]

I was thinking about the floppy drive on the 68k Macintosh via SCSI. I realized Apple had specific requirements for a SCSI device to interface correctly with the Apple SCSI Manager, which was part of Systems 6, 7, and probably 8 and 9. The SCSI Manager had various versions to deal with updates of the SCSI hardware and specifications.

Apple discussed the SCSI Manager in the Inside Macintosh Volume IV and V books, which can be easily found as PDF files online. Apple released various developer notes to write appropriate driver programs for specific SCSI devices, such as this chapter that discusses the driver requirements.

One approach is a small PCB that can emulate it as a SCSI device known to Apple. For example, that is how BlueSCSI does as it mimics and identifies itself as a Quantum Fireball HDD that Apple's SCSI controller on the logic board and the System SCSI Manager recognizes.

that makes sense! So, to MacOS, it just looks like a 400k/800k/1.4M hard disk?

 

[retr01]

that makes sense! So, to MacOS, it just looks like a 400k/800k/1.4M hard disk?

More or less. A hard drive image that size is unconventional, though. Usually, folks want a larger hard drive image. For example, I go for 2 TB, which System 7 can handle. I treat the 800k to 1.44 MB floppy disk images as disk images by Apple's Disk Copy utility. I understand that not all Macs can read 400k formatted disks or disk images.

Cheers,

 

[lilliputian]

I mean that's basically what happens when you use a floppy disk or zip drive on a modern computer with usb. It doesn't recognize it for what it is, it just mounts as a generic drive.

 

[retr01]

By the way, you only can mount up to 7 SCSI devices in a chain. One HDD image on the SD inserted in the BlueSCSI counts as one SCSI device. Another one? That's three total SCSI devices since the computer is already the 7th SCSI device.

Cheers,

 

[trag]

By the way, you only can mount up to 7 SCSI devices in a chain. One HDD image on the SD inserted in the BlueSCSI counts as one SCSI device. Another one? That's three total SCSI devices since the computer is already the 7th SCSI device.

Cheers,

<NITPICK> If you count the host controller (the computer) then the SCSI chain support 8 devices. IDs 0 -7 are available, but 7 is (almost) always occupied by the host controller. <\NITPICK>

 

[retr01]

<NITPICK> If you count the host controller (the computer) then the SCSI chain support 8 devices. IDs 0 -7 are available, but 7 is (almost) always occupied by the host controller. <\NITPICK>

Ah. I stand corrected. Thank you, @trag. IBM confirms that.