This is literally the most legendary thing you could have done with an 8 inch drive. I’ve always wanted an 8 inch drive. Serious props, lots of good theories put to the test. And writing from windows 7 too. Icing on the cake. Great work!
Thanks. It was a lot of fun (with a bit of frustration) figuring everything out so that I could make this video. But I haven't stopped there. I have another video where I demonstrate two 8 inch drives at the same time on this PC. I have four 8 inch drives in total. All are in working order, but only the modern ones can be operated in Windows. I have a Shugart 800 as well, but it seems the BIOS and OS (even DOS) don't like single sided drives. I recently created a setup with a secondary floppy controller (first tested with 3.5 inch drives). Now the only thing I need is an extra power supply and I can create a system with three 8 inch drives :)
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop Legendary! I wish I had kept my dual 8in Bernoulli drives, but upon plugging the unit in I let the magic smoke out, plus I think it was pre SCSI-1 so no hope of controlling it anyways. If I still had it around I'd send you the case to use for your 8in drives, but after it smoked family said it had to go and it was thrown away :( I still have the disks though!
@@SW20Turbo That's unfortunate, but still good to hear you at least kept the disks. I would have appreciated a case for my own drives. But on the other hand, it looks more interesting to operate them while being able to see the mechanics working :)
I have a pair of those 8" Mitsubishi drives that I've been using on a Z80 based S100 computer. I'm currently building an adapter to hook them up to my PC for backing up and restoring floppies. Making a DOS boot disk isn't something I thought was possible and now I have to try it.
Very cool video. I'm just getting started with the vintage computer hobby and have a great deal to learn. But these videos show that some of things that I hope to do can indeed be done. An interesting question is once an 8 inch disk is formatted by a Windows machine today (Windows 95 or 98 versions), what file types could be put on such a disk and still be readable on a vintage computer that actually used 8 inch drives back in the late 1970's or early 1980's. Perhaps a simple plain text file similar to a README TXT file?
Thanks. Your question relates more to which file system is used on the floppy disk. DOS and Windows normally use FAT12. Unless another computer system is compatible with that filesystem, it will not be able to read the disk at all (no matter what kind of files have been put on, text file or not). As you can imagine, DOS or Windows applications are guaranteed not to work on an other operating system unless that OS can emulate those environments (OS/2, for example) It is possible with special utilities to format any floppy in DOS or Windows to the desired legacy format. However, since I don't own any other architecture than x86, and since my 8 inch disks were all empty, I decided not to bother with using another file system.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop So as I understand this, you could put a modern file on this 8 inch drive, not too large of course, and it could be read by another Windows PC that is setup as well to work with an 8 inch drive as if it were a 5.25 inch drive? Another question, do you think a Windows 98 original Pentium 100 MHz computer would be able to do this just as your Windows 95 computer has? Thanks again
@@markwitt7983 Yes, you could write a modern file onto an 8 inch floppy disk using one Windows PC and read the disk back in another Windows PC, assuming you have a drive available for each PC. It would just work like any other floppy disk, 5.25 inch or 3.5 inch. Any 486 or Pentium 1 system should easily be able to do this. I wouldn't use Windows 98, though. Windows 98 is basically 95 + eyecandy and instability. If anything, it is probably less likely to work with legacy hardware than Windows 95.
So, it was formatted like a 5.25" HD drive, but 77 tracks/side? I think you could have bumped it up to 16 sectors/track (matching the 8x1K sector IBM format in capacity - 1232KiB) and the sector gap would be about 42, still quite good.
Correct. Indeed, during the time of the video, I hadn't tried out everything yet. I was assuming that for the best reliability it was best to stick to the 5.25" HD drive parameters, because that is what the BIOS was expecting. In the mean time, I found out that it is indeed possible to use 16 sectors per track. In fact, I have also experimented with 18 sectors per track, which works when the drive parameters in the BIOS are set to 3.5" HD. This yields about 1.38MB. However, it only works with certain disks. Some do not get past formatting track 0 with 18 sectors.
In principle, yes. Also it can work on PCs that only have 3.5" floppy drive support depending on what kind of format you are going for. It is possible to format an 8" disk with 18 sectors per track on good quality disks.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop I have a project computer I finished recently that uses the newest motherboard they ever made to support a native 5.25” floppy drive in the bios. It has USB 3.0 and support for a core i7. In fact I actually play new triple A titles on it that it’s so new. That would be amazing if I can go another step and have a 8” floppy drive on a windows 11 Pro computer. Because I’m already doing it with a 5.25”
You mention using NFormat to get the drive formatted with 77 tracks, but when you're formatting it first with ImageDisk, you also specify 77 cylinders. Is this the same thing as 77 tracks?
Technically, a cylinder refers to both sides of the disk, while a track refers to only one side of the disk. But in essence it is the same parameter. The reason the number of tracks/cylinders should be specified as 77 is because this is the native amount for 8 inch drives. If not specified, the program could default to 80, which is normal for 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drives, but which could do damage to the stepper motor of an 8 inch drive if it tries to seek to non-existent tracks outside its range. Also, it should be avoided since it could simply start overwriting the last track 3 times as its unable to move further mechanically, eventually causing issues in the filesystem when the OS thinks it can use those non-existent tracks.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop Oh, I understand why you need to format 8" disks to 77 tracks. What I was asking about was that you stated you needed NFormat to do this, but in the video you're setting it to 77 with ImageDisk before you even get to NFormat. That's what I'm confused on.
The reason I am using IMD first is because I found that if I attempt to use Nformat on a fully raw disk that was never formatted before, it has trouble. It would then find a lot of bad sectors or not format at all. It is kind of comparable with the MS-DOS format command that will say something along the lines of "Track 0 bad, disk unusable" and then terminate the format session altogether. I guess this has to do with the actual code in the applications. IMD is more tolerant regarding these things, but is at the same time not capable of writing a file system to the disk. So I use IMD to pre-format and Nformat to format and write the file system. On a side note, if you have a disk (any 3 1/2, 5 1/4 disk) that gives the "Track 0 bad, disk unusable" error at MS-DOS format, it might be "refreshed" and format normally after first doing an erase and format by IMD.
Not that I know of. Though I suspect that if you have a separate program that can manually write the FAT file system, it could do so without issue after a format with IMD.
This is literally the most legendary thing you could have done with an 8 inch drive. I’ve always wanted an 8 inch drive. Serious props, lots of good theories put to the test. And writing from windows 7 too. Icing on the cake. Great work!
Thanks. It was a lot of fun (with a bit of frustration) figuring everything out so that I could make this video. But I haven't stopped there. I have another video where I demonstrate two 8 inch drives at the same time on this PC.
I have four 8 inch drives in total. All are in working order, but only the modern ones can be operated in Windows. I have a Shugart 800 as well, but it seems the BIOS and OS (even DOS) don't like single sided drives.
I recently created a setup with a secondary floppy controller (first tested with 3.5 inch drives). Now the only thing I need is an extra power supply and I can create a system with three 8 inch drives :)
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop Legendary! I wish I had kept my dual 8in Bernoulli drives, but upon plugging the unit in I let the magic smoke out, plus I think it was pre SCSI-1 so no hope of controlling it anyways. If I still had it around I'd send you the case to use for your 8in drives, but after it smoked family said it had to go and it was thrown away :(
I still have the disks though!
@@SW20Turbo That's unfortunate, but still good to hear you at least kept the disks.
I would have appreciated a case for my own drives. But on the other hand, it looks more interesting to operate them while being able to see the mechanics working :)
I’ve never seen an 8in drive in action let alone on a windows pc! Thank you so much for sharing! 👍
I hadn't seen it either, but I wanted to. So I decided to try it myself :)
US Military still uses 8 inch floppy drives to this day but are undergoing upgrades to modern technology.
4:35 Now I can keep track of time
I have a pair of those 8" Mitsubishi drives that I've been using on a Z80 based S100 computer. I'm currently building an adapter to hook them up to my PC for backing up and restoring floppies. Making a DOS boot disk isn't something I thought was possible and now I have to try it.
Nice. I'm glad to be able to provide some inspiration.
I just hooked up a 8 inch low density, single sided drive. What is working for me so far, is nformat a: T77 H1 S15 L
Nice. Do you really have this working on Single Density? Not all floppy controllers can work with that. I always use Double Density in my videos.
Very cool video. I'm just getting started with the vintage computer hobby and have a great deal to learn. But these videos show that some of things that I hope to do can indeed be done. An interesting question is once an 8 inch disk is formatted by a Windows machine today (Windows 95 or 98 versions), what file types could be put on such a disk and still be readable on a vintage computer that actually used 8 inch drives back in the late 1970's or early 1980's. Perhaps a simple plain text file similar to a README TXT file?
Thanks. Your question relates more to which file system is used on the floppy disk. DOS and Windows normally use FAT12. Unless another computer system is compatible with that filesystem, it will not be able to read the disk at all (no matter what kind of files have been put on, text file or not). As you can imagine, DOS or Windows applications are guaranteed not to work on an other operating system unless that OS can emulate those environments (OS/2, for example)
It is possible with special utilities to format any floppy in DOS or Windows to the desired legacy format. However, since I don't own any other architecture than x86, and since my 8 inch disks were all empty, I decided not to bother with using another file system.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop So as I understand this, you could put a modern file on this 8 inch drive, not too large of course, and it could be read by another Windows PC that is setup as well to work with an 8 inch drive as if it were a 5.25 inch drive?
Another question, do you think a Windows 98 original Pentium 100 MHz computer would be able to do this just as your Windows 95 computer has? Thanks again
@@markwitt7983 Yes, you could write a modern file onto an 8 inch floppy disk using one Windows PC and read the disk back in another Windows PC, assuming you have a drive available for each PC. It would just work like any other floppy disk, 5.25 inch or 3.5 inch.
Any 486 or Pentium 1 system should easily be able to do this. I wouldn't use Windows 98, though. Windows 98 is basically 95 + eyecandy and instability. If anything, it is probably less likely to work with legacy hardware than Windows 95.
So, it was formatted like a 5.25" HD drive, but 77 tracks/side? I think you could have bumped it up to 16 sectors/track (matching the 8x1K sector IBM format in capacity - 1232KiB) and the sector gap would be about 42, still quite good.
Correct. Indeed, during the time of the video, I hadn't tried out everything yet. I was assuming that for the best reliability it was best to stick to the 5.25" HD drive parameters, because that is what the BIOS was expecting.
In the mean time, I found out that it is indeed possible to use 16 sectors per track. In fact, I have also experimented with 18 sectors per track, which works when the drive parameters in the BIOS are set to 3.5" HD. This yields about 1.38MB. However, it only works with certain disks. Some do not get past formatting track 0 with 18 sectors.
Will this work on any computer that has native 5.25” floppy support?
In principle, yes. Also it can work on PCs that only have 3.5" floppy drive support depending on what kind of format you are going for. It is possible to format an 8" disk with 18 sectors per track on good quality disks.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop I have a project computer I finished recently that uses the newest motherboard they ever made to support a native 5.25” floppy drive in the bios.
It has USB 3.0 and support for a core i7. In fact I actually play new triple A titles on it that it’s so new. That would be amazing if I can go another step and have a 8” floppy drive on a windows 11 Pro computer. Because I’m already doing it with a 5.25”
You mention using NFormat to get the drive formatted with 77 tracks, but when you're formatting it first with ImageDisk, you also specify 77 cylinders. Is this the same thing as 77 tracks?
Technically, a cylinder refers to both sides of the disk, while a track refers to only one side of the disk. But in essence it is the same parameter.
The reason the number of tracks/cylinders should be specified as 77 is because this is the native amount for 8 inch drives. If not specified, the program could default to 80, which is normal for 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drives, but which could do damage to the stepper motor of an 8 inch drive if it tries to seek to non-existent tracks outside its range. Also, it should be avoided since it could simply start overwriting the last track 3 times as its unable to move further mechanically, eventually causing issues in the filesystem when the OS thinks it can use those non-existent tracks.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop Oh, I understand why you need to format 8" disks to 77 tracks. What I was asking about was that you stated you needed NFormat to do this, but in the video you're setting it to 77 with ImageDisk before you even get to NFormat. That's what I'm confused on.
The reason I am using IMD first is because I found that if I attempt to use Nformat on a fully raw disk that was never formatted before, it has trouble. It would then find a lot of bad sectors or not format at all. It is kind of comparable with the MS-DOS format command that will say something along the lines of "Track 0 bad, disk unusable" and then terminate the format session altogether. I guess this has to do with the actual code in the applications. IMD is more tolerant regarding these things, but is at the same time not capable of writing a file system to the disk. So I use IMD to pre-format and Nformat to format and write the file system.
On a side note, if you have a disk (any 3 1/2, 5 1/4 disk) that gives the "Track 0 bad, disk unusable" error at MS-DOS format, it might be "refreshed" and format normally after first doing an erase and format by IMD.
@@FloppyDiskWorkshop Thank you very much! So, IMD can't format the disk into FAT?
Not that I know of. Though I suspect that if you have a separate program that can manually write the FAT file system, it could do so without issue after a format with IMD.
3:50 You can realy hear get the disc slashed into parts :)
wow incredible~~
how much mb can it hold?
At 15 sectors per track it can hold 512x15x77x2 = 1182720 bytes = 1.13MB
At 18 sectors per track it can hold 512x18x77x2 = 1419264 bytes = 1.35MB
Was this an IBM or a Shugart Associates 8 inch floppy drive?
Actually, neither. This is a Mitsubishi M2896-63, also known as the ultimate 8" floppy drive.
Cool