[iyonix-support] Five-and-a-quarter floppies

David recently asked
> Talking of 51/4" Floppies.....is there a drive out there going begging?

There must be many drives stored in attics, as mine is, but I don't 
know what would be needed to get one working with an Iyonix.

Even when I upgraded from my BBC B+ to an A5000, that already needed a 
special interface (which I think came from Beebug) to buffer the 
signals so it would talk to the old disc drive. And operation wasn't 
100% reliable even with the interface, though it did allow me to 
transfer all the files that I thought I wanted.

By the time I got my Iyonix, I had had no occasion to read any old 
floppies for some years, and I removed the interface from the A5000 to 
make room for an ethernet podule to allow another set of file 
transfers.

As the Iyonix has the hardware and software to talk to its built-in 3½ 
inch drive, it MIGHT be able to talk to a 5¼ inch drive, possibly with 
the aid of the Beebug interface. Does anyone know?

There's also the matter of disc formats. Many of my old floppies used 
the original DFS, and some of them used a Solidisk filing system that 
allowed multiple directories but with a different structure from ADFS. 
I think I had a utility on the A5000 that could cope with DFS. Might 
that run on an Iyonix with the help of Aemulor?

Richard
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