The Sinclair QL Forum

Been part of a mini QL meeting couple of weeks ago we faced a problem on how to transfer / copy files from 5 "1/4 floppy to a more suitable media. All those nice disks with lot of stuff from the old days should be preserved at my opinion so I asked the guy to lend them to me at home to try finding a solution. First thing I set up an amd64 dual floppy 5 "1/4 and 3.5" running winXP system to have the maximum compatibility and start the tests.
I will not bore you with theory for anyone who wants can read the following links to understand the differences between double density, rmp speed and the unknown until now for me quad density of qdos.
http://theqlforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=780
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blo ... age-QL.htm

amongst others.
Started reading with q-emulator did not worked but nevertheless it showed me the disk directory and unreadable the remaining data. To keep it brief I used every program present in the above links and on Dilwyn site all ending up in failures. Pissed off i slept over it and as usual the morning a bright idea came along. Long ago when trying to do a similar job with floppies in opus discovery format for the zx spectrum I've found a very useful program called Omniflop,
http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm
After installing the special disk drivers needed and although the test with the same program in copy mode failed, I saw that it recognized the specific format on the disk, tried running again in q-emulator putted the floppy in and ... success! I could read the files. Clearly before something could go wrong I've transferred all disks in img images and now all programs including a nice strip poker never show before are preserved.
Just for completeness I did tried to read those 360k DD disks formatted in 800k qdos mode in real hardware with my trump card and a 5"1/4 floppy connected but there was a continuous no way, and trust me I know a lot regarding cables, jumpers, data lines, motor on, ready signal and all the related stuff.
With the new pc floppy drivers installed the only thing not yet managed to do is just re-format again the 5 "1/4 floppies using q-emulator, only writing on preformated ones works. Hope this info could help others with similar needs.

Hi,

If you have the 5 1/4" drive correctly connected to the PC, why not get QPC2, which should read the QL floppy disks.

QPC2 is now free and the best QL emulator for running under Windows or Linux with Wine

Yes, forgot to say that I've tried all QL emulators including qpc2 and nothing worked for those particular disks. And for sure in Linux should be a lot easier cause the way drivers and images are handled but I do not have a working setup at the moment

Welcome to the forum!

Are the 5.25" disks you are trying to read formatted to 360K or 720K in QDOS?

If they are 720K, then they are 80 track disks. Most 5.25" DD disk drives in PC's were 40 track drives and will not be able to read 80 track disks.

There were 80 track 5.25" drive made (I've got one lurking about somewhere). The 5.25" HD drives used in PC's were 80 track, but I don't know if one of these would work for you. As the drives detected what kind of disk was inserted and switched between 40 and 80 track mode accordingly. (I think it was an extra cut out in the disk sleeve. You might be able to trick a HD drive into reading a 80 track DD disk by adding the cut out to your disks)

First thank you for the welcome, it was my first post but I'm a long time follower of the forum, I'm mostly active in WOS forum since the majority of my collection is spectrum related, anyway lately I finally managed to repair most of my QL stuff and enjoy it.
Second for Rich, I could not reply to your pm since it says I'm not allowed to write Pm's, anyway I'm Akis from Greece, we talked lately on email and I'll reply you there.
Now @Martin_Head, the disks are 360k media and half of them have the cut on the other side even if with the 1.2M drive I use does not seams to matter. From what information I could gather they are formatted at 720k qdos with an obscure QL interface connected to a double BBC 5.25" drive that seams to be DD / 80 tracks hardware that I was not aware existed at least in the PC market.
Replacing the original windows driver for floppies with the modded one from Omniflop did the trick and I could read and write to these disks with my classic 5.25" HD drive. Only think I could not manage is to reformat these disks to the same 720k qdos format. Also had no luck on real hardware using my trump card and a 5.25" drive that a checked to be shougart type set to df0 and master.
Will play some more with the media and I'll try to convince my friend also a member here to lend me that interface and the double drive to do some more tests.
You could see that hardware in the photos during our local 30's QL celebration party. Link follows

http://www.retrocomputers.gr/forum/sinc ... y-workshop

Cheers

PM's should fine now. It's just a restriction until a newly registered user makes a few posts

Pluto63 wrote: Now @Martin_Head, the disks are 360k media and half of them have the cut on the other side even if with the 1.2M drive I use does not seams to matter. From what information I could gather they are formatted at 720k qdos with an obscure QL interface connected to a double BBC 5.25" drive that seams to be DD / 80 tracks hardware that I was not aware existed at least in the PC market.
Replacing the original windows driver for floppies with the modded one from Omniflop did the trick and I could read and write to these disks with my classic 5.25" HD drive. Only think I could not manage is to reformat these disks to the same 720k qdos format. Also had no luck on real hardware using my trump card and a 5.25" drive that a checked to be shougart type set to df0 and master.
Will play some more with the media and I'll try to convince my friend also a member here to lend me that interface and the double drive to do some more tests.

It's been a long time since I had anything to do with 5.25" HD drives. But I remember that the HD disks were made of a different magnetic material than DD disks. So you could have trouble formatting DD disks in a HD drive, If someone has made extra cut outs in DD disks to fool the drive. You say that half of the disks have the extra cut out, Do you have mixed HD and DD disks?

I also seem to remember that there was problems deleting files/formatting 360K disks in in HD drives, because the read/write heads in a HD drive were smaller. So they did not overwrite the full width of the disks track, and so the disk could/would have trouble being read in a DD drive.

All in all I would avoid trying to use a 5.25" HD disk drive in a QL at all.