[Techtoolslist] Using a USB floppy emulator with the Fluke 9100

[Tony Jones]

There's been a few posts in the last few days about floppies.
Archiving them,  trying to get them working etc.

There are two parts to the problem:

1. Archiving existing media. Ideally in a) a consistent format b) in a
way which allows the status of the disks to be known (bad sectors,
modified disks etc).     What Ian has come up with is a huge
improvement over the mess that was previously on the ftp site.

2. Taking one of the images in an archive and writing it to a blank
floppy so it can be installed onto the 9100.

The second of these requires two working floppy drives, one on your PC
to create the image and another on the Fluke to read it.  It also
requires a supply of blank floppy disks.      SamDisk won't work with
USB floppy drives connected to a PC, so you need an older PC mainboard
with a floppy interface.

I know I'm not the first person to do this but it's possible to use
one of the commodity USB Floppy Emulators such as the Gotek
(http://www.gotek.in/) with the Fluke 9100.

Pictures of my 9105FT with the Gotek installed are here.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1t9FjN-5rI7PCDkevseEc4bJ1QMS9hPk1?usp=sharing

I think the Gotek cost me $17 shipped.

I'm running the free Flash Floppy firmware
(https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy)  You will need a USB->serial
header adapter to initially flash this.   I've also performed the
common mod to add an i2c lcd display ($3) which allows you to select
images by name on the front panel.    I plan to add the small speaker
to minic the drive head sound (after using it for a while I miss the
audio confirmation that something is taking place).

Geir Fraser who wrote the Xen hypervisor wrote Flash Floppy, he also
wrote disk-utilities which supports converting from Kryoflux stream
format to HFE, one of the formats supported by Flash Floppy.      It's
possible to have hundreds of floppy images stored on the Gotek
(limited only by the size of the USB stick) and you can select which
one is active via the two switches on the drive.

You can boot images (service disk etc) off the Gotek using SOFT+F2+F4
or you can use it as the source for an fd0->hdd copy.   If you have a
9105FT which has two floppy bags you can install a DPDT switch onto
the drive 0/1 select lines and install a Gotek and a standard floppy
and switch between them (normally the firmware when configured for
9100 mode only sees FD0).

You'll need to set the interface type to "shugart" in FF.CFG on the
root of your USB stick, other than this it's plug and play.

HTH.

Tony