Multibooter

I have attached a screen shot of Properties in Win98SE Device Manager of a Caleb drive. The people at Caleb even had the gall to call their drive "Caleb LS-120". No Firmware revision is indicated. Win98 Device Manager has actually 2 entries for this parallel Caleb drive: - in class Disk drives: "Caleb LS-120" - in class SCSI controllers: "Imation SuperDisk Drive - Parallel Port" WinXP Device Manager has the following 2 entries for this parallel Caleb drive: - in class Floppy disk drives: "Caleb LS-120" - in class System Devices: "SCM PPort LS-120 Adapter" I had the Imation LS-120 parallel driver for WinXP v1.01 already installed, and the Caleb drive was detected/installed without having to enter anything. Under Win98 My Computer displayed the drive letter K: for the Caleb drive, under WinXP the drive letter B: The Wikipedia has an image of the Caleb drive at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caleb-uhd144.jpg , with the comment "This is a rare image of a rare product. Not many of these were sold, and images of it are rare." Let's see whether this rare drive is actually useful, or whether it is just obsolete stuff for the museum.

Technical details about the Caleb drive Technical details can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20000511030236/http://www.caleb-bldr.com/specs.html I have attached a screen shot of the boot sector of a virgin Caleb 144MB diskette. At the left of the screen are also technical details as seen by WinHex

The Caleb UHD144i is a lesser known counterpart of the LS-120 drive. By comparing the Caleb and the LS-120/240 drives, maybe some unique capabilities can be discovered. Software for SuperFloppy drives in general could be tested with the Caleb drive. The Caleb UHD144 as an external parallel drive The Caleb drive is an ATAPI/IDE device, intended for desktop computers. I have currently a Caleb drive connected to the parallel port of my 11-year-old Inspiron 7500 laptop, in a somewhat unusual way: (see attached picture) - I have taken the IDE/ATAPI to parallel bridge EPATP-LS120 by Shuttle Technology, from an Imation LS-120 Parallel Drive model no.11795 (actually is was the bridge inside of a bad/non-working parallel LS-120 drive) and connected it to the Caleb drive - I used the Imation LS-120 parallel driver v1.43. The driver was actually prepared by Shuttle Technology and only slightly modified by Imation. It seems to work fine, except that the Caleb drive in My Computer has the name "SuperDisk". Since Imation has drivers for parallel LS-120 drives for DOS, Win3x, Win9x and WinXP, this little construct should work also under these operating systems.

How about using the terms which Roberto Grassi, the author of GRDuw, the best software for superfloppies, has used in his Disk Information Report, e.g. or

I am attaching a Disk Information Report, generated by GRDuw, for a 40MB clik! disk, which is really tiny, fits inside a PCMCIA card, with a diameters of about 5cm. The diskette is in a sturdy metal casing. clik!_info.txt

Under DOS 6.22, with an LS-120 drive connected at the parallel port and a good LS-120 diskette inside, err msg at program start:"* * * CATASTROPHIC FAILURE * * * <Message> MH_SCSIP.SDRV_INQUIRY FAIL <End of Message>" I guess MHDD didn't get along with the parallel port driver of the LS-120 drive, or with the IDE/ATAPI to parallel bridge by Shuttle Connection in the drive enclosure. The manual of MHDD lists as supported hardware "Any SCSI removable media such as tape, CDROM". I would generalize that any formatting software which does not specifically mention the type of superdisk drive (e.g. LS-120, Iomega zip, Iomega jaz) in the program description or in the program menu, will not work with that particular type of superdisk drive. @dencorso I had tried HD LLF from HDDguru earlier, but it doesn't see an LS-120 drive at the parallel port. HD LLF is my tool of choice for wiping HDDs, that's why I tried MHDD, also for download at HDDguru, first.

You were right, AFDISK came up Ok in a Win98SE DOS box, it displayed under Select SCSI Device: "HA #2 - Target 0 MATs***ALS-120 COSM 03". This was the only device displayed, I had a an LS-120 drive connected at the parallel port.Unfortunately, when I pressed Enter to select the LS-120 drive, the following msg came up: "!!! Unable to Partition Drive !!! The ASPI manager controlling this device is returning a Head/Sector translation scheme which this revision of AFDISK does NOT support." I also connected a USB LS-120 drive and a PCMCIA LS-120 drive, but AFDISK just displayed the msg :"No SCSI drives were found." When I connected an Iomega zip 100 drive to the parallel port, with a good 100MB zip disk inside, AFDISK listed the drive as as "HA #0 - Target 6 IOMEGA ZIP 100", but when I selected it, the following msg was displayed: "!!! ATTENTION !!! You have selected a SCSI drive which is controlled by DOS though the Host Adapter BIOS. Use DOS FDISK and FORMAT commands to partition and format the device. AFDISK will only allow you to view the devices partitions." With a bulk-erased zip disk inside the Iomega zip drive, AFDISK displayed the following err msg: "!!! ERROR OCCURRED DURING IO OPERATION !!! Read Capacity Command. Check Status Returned. <target 6> CDB: 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" If some tool could write track 0 onto these bulk-erased removable disks, GRDuw could subsequently probably transfer the image of a good LS-120 diskette or of a good zip 100 disk to the bulk-erased LS-120/zip disk. By using the image of a virgin LS-120/zip disk, the bulk-erased disk would then be nicely re-initialized and formatted.

I had tried WinHex earlier and it couldn't write to a bulk-erased LS-120 diskette. GDisk32 requires as parameter a physical fixed disk number (1-8) http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2002112213111525 That sounds more like GDisk32 doesn't work with removable media/LS-120 drives, standalone Ghost 11.0.2, for example, doesn't display removable drives, or the type "3 1/2 Inch Floppy Disk", as indicated for the LS-120 drive in My Computer. I tried "gdisk /status" under MS-DOS 6.22, but the system just hung. AFDISK v3.34 seems to hang on my Inspiron 7500 laptop under MS-DOS 6.22, the msg "Please wait" kept on flashing for about 20 mins, until I rebooted, although there was some HDD activity. Maybe AFDISK requires an Adaptec SCSI PCI card, or a line in config.sys, or I am missing a file, no idea. AFDISK seems to be the most promising of the three.

For regular floppies and hard disks, yes. For removable media of the "SuperFloppy" type, >2.88MB, NO. Their drives, when used internally, use the hard disk controller, not the onboard floppy disk controller. How about experimenting with bulk-erased Iomega zip disks, to see whether any of these floppy disk utilities can write track 0 on a bulk-erased/de-gaussed Iomega zip disk? I just bulk-erased an Iomega zip disk, to see what happens. In My Computer, on the context menu of the Iomega removable drive, the selections of Iomega Format, Iomega Protect and Iomega Eject were greyed out. And the Iomega tab in the drive properties sheet displayed: Disk Type: No disk inserted, even if the de-gaussed zip disk was in the Iomega zip drive. Perhaps the de-gaussed zip disk can be revived with the manufacturer-specific Iomega SCSI Utilities under DOS. Good luck. The Iomega zip 100 drive is single-format only, i.e. it accepts only 100MB zip disks, the drive doesn't have to decide on which type of media is inserted. On dual-format drives ( e.g. LS-120 for 1.44MB/120MB diskettes, or Caleb drives for 1.44MB/144MB diskettes) writing track 0 onto a de-gaussed diskette may be even trickier, and there are no manufacturer-provided utilties for re-initialization of diskettes, at least as far as I know. A track-0-writer should be able to write on degaussed removable media, so that eventually any super disk image, even with changes in media type and other info on track 0, can be written back to the physical media of the appropriate capacity. If I have an image, I want to be able to write it back to the media. GRDuw can create image files of probably most removable media, but can only restore a few image types, if it likes track 0 of the image and track 0 on the target media. GRDuw, for example, cannot write back the image of a 100MB zip disk to a de-gaussed 100MB zip disk, err msg: "Checking disk media ... Please insert a disk", even if the de-gaussed zip disk was inserted.

That'd be my intention but it'll take quite some time before I figure out all the tricks. The big problem is, I don't have access to any of those pieces of hardware you're talking about., so actual testing would have to be performed by people who do. I would be glad to do some testing on my old removable drives/media, just send me a PM.@dencorso: I posted my 5 cents at so that postings stay focused.

Low-level formatting of LS-120 diskettes The following 2 quotes are from another topic and I am replying here, so that info relevant to LS-120 is found in this topic. Thanks, but I doubt that these programs can do it. During experimentation some time ago I had saved with MBRWizard the MBR of a good LS-120 diskette, and had then tried to write the good MBR onto a bulk-erased LS-120 diskette. It didn't work, I got an error message. 2 Read/Write heads I would guess that the inability to low-level format bulk-erased LS-120 diskettes is caused the dual-format nature of LS-120 drives: "There are two read/write heads with laser tracking in a SuperDisk Drive, one for SuperDisk Diskettes and one for 3.5" diskettes. If the laser tracking goes out of alignment, you will no longer be able to use SuperDisk Diskettes in your drive." http://web.archive.org/web/20060311195655/http://www.imation.com/support/products/superdisk_faq.html I would speculate that LS-120/240 drives read the media type on track 0 of a diskette, and something else unknown to me, to decide which of the 2 read/write heads should be used for reading/writing. On bulk-erased LS-120 diskettes there is no track 0, and perhaps the formatting software then doesn't know which heads to use, and whether an LS-120 diskette or a regular floppy disk should be formatted. But strangely enough, an LS-120 drive can low-level format bulk-erased 720KB and 1.44MB floppy disks. A 720KB floppy set to write-protected has the same hole combination open/covered as an LS-120 diskette, but the write-protected 720KB floppy is recognized as such by the SuperDisk Format Utility v2.03. The 2 square holes in LS-120 diskettes are a tiny bit smaller than those of regular floppy disks, maybe that's the explanation. No idea how an LS-120 drive decides that the diskette inside is an LS-120 diskette, and not something else.

I like the screen shot of BootMaker. It is a little OT, but would it be possible to turn BootMaker into a track-0-writer for removable media, so that it could, for example, write/re-create track 0 on a bulk-erased/de-gaussed removable media disk, e.g. a bulk-erased LS-120 diskette? Such a tool could be very useful for re-initializing the rare special removable media of dual-format drives in general (e.g. also Floptical, Sony HiFD, Caleb UHD144).

A 2.88MB floppy belongs rather to the category "superfloppies" than "floppies". Like an LS-120 diskette, an unmodified 2.88MB floppy cannot be read, written to or formatted by a regular floppy drive, and the magnetic media used (Barium ferrite) is different from regular floppies. A 2.88MB floppy disk is similar to an LS-120 diskette: you can stick both into a regular floppy drive, but the regular floppy drive will not be able to do anything useful with it.I don't like the term "superfloppy", it was probably used more by advertising folks. Here an ad in InfoWorld, of 21-Oct-1991, by Toshiba about their 2.88MB superfloppy http://books.google.de/books?id=2j0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=superfloppy+trademark&source=bl&ots=aAxn4jY2CY&sig=eD7Cyt2GS689rZRr-Apf2n44vUc&hl=de [it's on p.53] The 2.88MB floppy was perhaps the first superfloppy. The term "super floppy" is ambiguous http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=super+floppy&i=52221,00.asp Imation trademarked "SuperDisk" for their LS-120 diskettes in March 1997 http://electronics.zibb.com/trademark/superdisk/29599892 perhaps because it sounded like the term "super floppy", used by the other companies advertising their wares. BTW, my own memory somehow associates the term superfloppy with Iomega, maybe Iomega used it most effectively in their advertising, e.g. "Check out the new Zip® 250MB USB drive, the latest SuperFloppy solution from Iomega®." http://www.iomega.com/anz/zip_usb250.html In my ongoing search for a software tool to low-level format a bulk-erased LS-120 diskette I checked out a formatting tool called Media Preparation (by Shuttle Technology, Nov.1997, can supposedly low-level format Flopticals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical ), which in the help file contained the following text, not sure whether it helps: "Large Floppy format is a single non-bootable partition. This formatting standard is the de facto Windows 95 standard for removable media and was originally called "Large Floppy" by IBM. The operation involves creating a fresh boot record, root directory and File Allocation Table (FAT). Large formatted media can be read by all operating systems that support FAT file system".

I inserted the PCMCIA card of the Accurite LS-120 drive into the Iomega USB clik! dock when the clik! dock was not yet connected to the computer. The green activity light of the Accurite LS-120 drive, with an LS-120 diskette inserted, started to flicker, but when pressing the eject button on the LS-120 drive, the LS-120 diskette was not ejected. I had a 5V 1.0A power supply connected to the Iomega clik! dock, which has a label in the back stating "5V 1.0A". I suspected that the power supply was not strong enough to power both the Iomega clik! dock and the Accurite LS-120 drive. The user manual of the Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA drive stated 5V, 1000mA peak. So I connected a stronger power supply (5V, 3.0A) to the Iomega USB clik! dock, and lo and behold, the activity light of the Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA drive stopped flickering and I could eject the inserted LS-120 diskette. The Accurite LS-120 drive was drawing sufficient power from the Iomega USB clik! dock. I then connected the Iomega USB clik! dock via USB cable to my up-and-running Inspiron 7500 laptop. Win98 detected the USB clik! dock with the Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA card inside, but the Device Manager displayed "Iomega Click!Dock" [note the differing spelling of "Click!Dock", not "clik! dock", symptomatic of Iomega quality control when it comes to software] with a yellow exclamation mark. The General tab of the properties sheet of the USB clik! dock displayed under Device status: "This device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed (Code 10)". Similar under WinXP. No hardware seems to have been damaged during my experiment, but apparently an Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA drive does not work when connected to an iomega USB Clik! dock. No idea what the Iomega clik! stuff can be used for in 2011. Any suggestions?

I have an old Iomega clik! PCMCIA drive, several 40MB clik! disks and a USB Dock for the PCMCIA drive. I have been wondering whether this is just old, obsolete and useless computer junk, or whether this clik! drive could be still useful for some special purpose under DOS, Win98 or WinXP, in 2011. I have used clik! disks via a PCMCIA interface and via USB. There exists also a parallel port dock for the clik! drive, which I never got. a) PCMCIA interface The clik! disk is inserted into the clik! PCMCIA card. This clik! disk inside the clik! PCMCIA card was recognized immediately under Win98 when inserted into the PCMCIA slot of my old laptop, because I had installed for my zip and jaz drives IomegaWare v2.2.1, which is probably the least buggy version, a long time ago. b ) USB interface When the clik! disk is inside the Clik! PCMCIA card, and both are inserted into the USB clik! dock model C40-D, the 3 together as seen/detected as a USB mass storage device. Under Win98 (with nusb) and under WinXP the USB dock+PCMCIA card+clik! disk are detected and installed automatically, no user intervention is required. Here is a list of characteristics of clik! disks and clik! drives, which speak AGAINST using them at all: - clik! disks are quite slow. Checking the disk, for example, with Norton Disk Doctor, including a surface test, takes about 27 minutes - the clik! disks are special miniature disks and the clik! drives cannot be used with regular floppy disks, in contrast to LS-120 drives, for example - the 40MB capacity of a clik! disk makes clik! disks way too small for today's storage requirements - clik! disks can be made bootable, but I don't know which special benefit it would have to boot from 40MB clik! disks. - clik! disks, when used inside the PCMCIA slot, instead of inside the external USB dock, get hot, maybe 50 degrees centigrade. No idea how reliable magnetic media is, if it gets baked at such a temperature. The only use I could imagine of the Iomega clik! USB docking station would be --- to serve as a docking station/USB adapter for an Imation/Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA drive. The clik! USB dock requires (this is a must) its own 5V power supply, a standard external power supply, with normal polarity as used for most current USB 2.0 mass storage devices. The Imation/Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA drive usually works with power from the PCMCIA port, but came with an optional 5V external power supply, which had a 5V-plug with a REVERSED polarity, as found with some older USB 1.1 mass storage devices. I am just afraid of destroying both the (rare) clik! USB dock and the Imation/Accurite LS-120 PCMCIA drive in such an experiment. Any ideas, suggestions or cautionary notes? I am attaching a screen shot of a clik! disk formatted to UDF 2.01. clik! disks are usually formatted FAT16. The Iomega tab in the screen shot gives access to the tools of IomegaWare v2.2.1 (e.g. Drive Info, Drive Sleep Time, Drive Diagnostics, Disk Info including date manufactured and Protection Status (write protect, password protect). clik1 disks have no sliding tab to switch beween write-protected and write-enabled. The selection "Make drive non-removable" is greyed out and de-selected. The context menu of the clik! drive contains the selections "Iomega Format" and "Iomega Protect". Iomega Format can format a UDF-formatted clik! disk back to FAT16. Any ideas what else clik! drives could be used for in 2011?

This is the unregistered shareware version 5.30 (check vgacopy.cfg in hex editor). I am using the full retail version which I bought many years ago in a computer store on a CD. According to the author (vganleit.exe, around line 1180) the shareware version is fully functional, only a 25 sec nag at the beginning and an extra page displayed when exiting. The German text displayed in vganleit.exe can be saved as VGANLEIT.ASC by pressing 'F' when vganleit is up, more info: F1. Press 'S' to search for a string I downloaded and tested the shareware version, it seems to work fine on my 11-year-old Inspiron under WinXP, I had a parallel Imation LS-120 drive connected (Model SD 120 PPD2), and this unregistered shareware version 5.30 read, wrote and formatted Ok a 1.44MB floppy in the LS-120 drive. The only files needed to run VGA-Copy are vgacopy.exe, vgacopy.bin, vgacopy.cfg and vgacopy.idf. The .voc files can be safely deleted/renamed to turn off the sound, I remember vaguely that this helped to resolve an issue. SlowDown v3.10Runtime error 200 at 1289:0091? This runtime error 200 seems to occur with some old programs, e.g. DiskDupe v4.07, when the CPU is too fast for the software. Download SlowDown v3.10 http://bretjohnson.us/ and try to run VGA-Copy 5.30 via SlowDown, with the following Cmd Line in the desktop shortcut to vgacopy.exe: D:\VGACOPY\SLOWDOWN.COM /MHz486=30 /Int70h VGACOPY.EXE I have slowdown.com in the same folder as vgacopy.exe, e.g. D:\VGACOPY\ You may have to experiment with the value of the /MHz486 parameter, it's trial and error and varies from computer to computer, also between operating systems. With this parameter the time used to read or write a floppy can be changed. Sometimes you have to click several times on the desktop shortcut until VGA-Copy comes up. The files vgacp50a.zip (older v5.0a) http://www-ftp.lip6.fr/pub/pc/garbo/pc/diskutil/vgacp50a.zip and vgacp.zip (v6.21) in my software archive contain English-language manuals (VGACOPY.DOC). There is apparently no English manual for v5.30 Miscellaneous notes about VGA-Copy v5.3: - click on the A: or B: button to select the drive. You may, for example, select drive A:, read in a floppy in drive A:, then select B: and write to a floppy in drive B: - there are 2 Format buttons, quite confusing: the left-most Format button makes a full format when set to ON, the Format button in the middle just selects the desired format type ( 1200KB, 1.44MB,etc) - to format a floppy you first have to select the format type with the format button in the middle, and then click on the Write button to actually do the formatting - error msg 0C: the controller doesn't accept the selected format - bad sectors are displayed as yellow bars in the info window, VGA-Copy does NOT mark them as bad (as DOS FORMAT does). - click on the Info button to check whether a write or format operation was done Ok - use chkdsk b: to clear the drive if things go wrong after inserting different odd-formatted floppies - use chkdsk b: /f to fix a freshly-formatted 3.5" 1200KB floppy; the 3.5" 1200KB floppy is then Ok .VCP image files of floppy disks: .VCP image files can be made from a floppy and written to a floppy via parameters in 2 additional desktop shortcuts: a) Desktop shortcut "Make VCP from floppy": Cmd Line to create image file: Properties -> Program tab D:\VGACOPY\SLOWDOWN.COM /MHz486=30 /Int70h VGACOPY.EXE D:\VGACOPY\IMAGE.VCP /!0R NOTE: in '!0R' 0 is floppy drive A; all characters after the ! are the underlined characters in the buttons of the VGA-Copy screen b ) Desktop shortcut "Write VCP to floppy": Cmd Line to write from an image file: Properties -> Program tab D:\VGACOPY\SLOWDOWN.COM /MHz486=30 /Int70h VGACOPY.EXE D:\VGACOPY\IMAGE.VCP /!0W Reading and writing image files is in the documentation file VGANLEIT.EXE (German), line 974, under "Transdisk-Funktion und Batch-Betrieb". Maybe the unusual term "Transdisk-Funktion" was used because there was no standard term in German yet for reading and writing floppy image files at the time, or maybe it came from the Amiga world, e.g. http://winuaehelp.back2roots.org/started/transdisk.htm , maybe VGA-Copy v5.3 can also create images of Amiga floppies http://eab.abime.net/archive/index.php/t-42332.html or http://www.bing.com/search?q=amiga+%22vga-copy%22&go=&qs=n&sk=&form=QBLH , no idea. WinImage v8.50 under WinXP can open and mount to a virtual drive .VCP image files created by VGA-Copy v5.3.

Hi jaclaz, I have test-installed Letter Assigner v1.2.0, but apparently it is not possible to assign under Win98SE the drive letter B: to the LS-120 drive K:, I got the err msg: "it is impossible to use letter B for any drive other then its current owner, because B: is one of several letters assigned to the single physical drive". Also, when I right-click in the Letter Assigner window on any of the drives displayed, I get the err msg "Letass32. The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Win98 crashes shortly afterwards and I had to reboot + fix lost clusters. Any other suggestions? BTW, the drive letter issue is probably just the most visible layer of problems to get VGA-Copy v5.3 to work with an LS-120 drive under Win98. A. VGA-Copy v5.3 with the left-bay module (ATAPI/IDE LS-120 drive plus CD/DVD drive, both bootable) of my 11-year-old Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop The left-bay LS-120 module of my laptop, as perhaps also the LS-120 drives of other laptop makes, may function in a special way with the help of the laptop BIOS. 1) Under MS-DOS 7 - works fine: - the LS-120 drive is accessible under 2 drive letters (A: via the BIOS, J: via the Matsus***a driver), both with regular floppy disks and with 120MB LS-120 diskettes - VGA-Copy v5.3 works fine accessing the LS-120 under A: - on the 700MHz Inspiron I have used VGACopy v5.3 with the help of SlowDown v1.01 and v3.10, using the following comand lines: slowd310.com /mhz486=30 /Int70h vgacopy.exe [slowDown v3.10 was renamed to slowd310.com, could be a different name] slowdown.com /2980 vgacopy.exe [this is slowdown.com v1.01,] - both SlowDown versions work fine under MS-DOS 7 - finding working parameters for SlowDown is a matter of trial-and-error and varies with the hardware used. 2) Under Win98SE (DOS window) - doesn't work: - the LS-120 drive is accessible under only 1 drive letter A: - VGA-Copy v5.3 comes up in a full-screen DOS window and recognizes the LS-120 drive as A: with the same Cmd lines in the desktop shortcut:as under MS-DOS 7.1 - when trying to read a regular floppy, VGA-Copy freezes analysing track 0, the only way to exit is to pull the plug - when trying to write to/format a regular floppy, the full-screen VGHACopy window disappears/crashes and the following err msg is displayed under Win98: "SLOWDOWN - VGACOPY. This program has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated. If the program consistently encounters problems, click the Start button, then select Help, Troubleshooting, and 'if you are having trouble running MS-DOS programs' " 3) Under WinXP (Command prompt window) - doesn't work: - the LS-120 drive is accessible under only 1 drive letter A: - VGA-Copy v5.3 loads Ok with SlowDown v3.10, but not with SlowDown v1.01. When I tried to format a regular floppy, with Verify ON, all the diagnostic/status bars etc looked fine. After the formatting process was done, I clicked on the Info button to check the floppy, and surprise: "Disk in drive A:, Size: 0 bytes, Free: 0 bytes." The MS Properties sheet displayed the file system as RAW. So something went really wrong, no idea why. Running VGA-Copy with the left-bay LS-120 module under Win98 and WinXP does look like a can of worms. On the positive side, VGA-Copy v5.3 worked fine with the left-bay LS-120 drive under DOS 7. In subsequent postings I will describe in which hardware/software combinations VGA-Copy works Ok with LS-120 drives.

None that I know of. UPDATE: I got VGACopy v5.3 to work with LS-120 drives under WinXP. More information about VGACopy on LS-120 drives will be posted at starting with posting #77

Thanks dencorso. I have updated the index in posting #1. It's definitely worth while looking at the index in posting #1, the LS-120 topic is huge and it's easy to loose the overview over all the info and details spread out across various postings. VGA-Copy v5.3 works with an LS-120 drive under WinXP After quite a bit of fiddling around, VGA-Copy v5.3 works fine with ATAPI/IDE (=internal) and parallel LS-120 drives under WinXP. VGA-Copy v5.3, however, has issues with USB LS-120 drives under WinXP. The freeware VGA-Copy v6.25 http://www.moenk.de/pages/vgacopy.html and http://www.zdnet.de/download/30593/vga-copy.htm also recognizes LS-120 drives under WinXP, but when reading in a floppy with my 11-year old Inspiron 7500 laptop, or with my more modern dual core desktop, I eventually get the err msg: "Out of memory, aborted". Since my old v5.3 works fine now with LS-120 drives, I will not pursue v6.25 any further. Maybe others, who don't have v5.3, may attempt to get v6.25 going. VGA-Copy v5.3 is arguably the best floppy disk copying and formatting software. VGA-Copy can be set to read bad sectors up to 99 times and LS-120 drives have a much better error correction than regular floppy drives. The combo VGA-Copy v5.3 plus LS-120 drive is probably the best tool to recover damaged floppy disks. In subsequent postings I will explain how ancient VGA-Copy v5.3, of 1994, can be made to run fine with LS-120 drives under WinXP. I was not able to get VGA-Copy v5.3 to run with LS-120 drives under Win98, the initial hurdle being the drive letter assignment: VGA-Copy works with floppy drives A: and B:. WinXP assigns to an ATAPI/IDE or parallel LS-120 drive the drive letter B:, but Win98 assigns to LS-120 drives a drive letter following the HDDs, e.g. K:, L: etc.

How about moving the topic index page, which is currently posting #22, to the front, or putting a copy of #22 to the front?

@dencorso: Thanks for moving the postings from the garage sale topic to this topic. Could you position these postings, currently #1-21, before posting #69, so that the old posting #1 remains the first posting? Thanks again.

Hi jaclaz, I have checked out Format720. It does not run under Win98SE, you get the err msg: "Opening floppy drive A:... Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified" Format720 under WinXP Under WinXP Format720 formats Ok already-formatted as well as bulk-erased 720KB floppy disks, both in a regular floppy disk drive and in an LS-120 drive. When formatting bulk-erased 720KB floppies, a possibly misleading warning msg appears, which can be ignored: "format720.exe - Unknown Disk Format. The disk in drive A: is not formatted properly. Please check the disk, and reformat if necessary" After clicking on Continue, the floppy will be reformatted Ok. Format720 can format a 720KB diskette only in drive A:, not in a drive with another letter. Format720 therefore only works with an internal ATAPI/IDE LS-120 drive or a regular floppy drive which can format 720KB. Format720 does not work on external drives (USB, parallel or PCMCIA), unless there are some special tricks to change the drive letter to A: Searching for a program to low-level format LS-120/240 diskettes LS-120/240 diskettes can die quickly, mainly because of a bad track 0. About half of my LS-120 diskettes have died, and the production of LS-120 diskettes was stopped many years ago. Maybe a low-level formatting program could revive 50% of my dead or bad LS-120 diskettes. In 10 years from now, probably most of the LS-120 diskettes around will have died, and recovering LS-120 diskettes with bad track 0 will be essential. 2 years ago I bought a box with 10 LS-240 diskettes for $15, now they are hard to find and cost around $6+S&H at amazon, for a single diskette. At ebay.com there is currently just 1 single LS-240 diskette offered at $15+S&H. A 400-1000% increase in 2 years I have not yet come across a program which can low-level format bulk-erased LS-120 diskettes. I couldn't get Micro-Scope 2005 to format LS-120 diskettes. Format720, however, can low-level format regular 720KB floppy disks in an LS-120 drive. Maybe Format720 could be modified to low-level format LS-120 diskettes? Format720 was written in Borland C++. It is a small program and the open source (GNU) can be downloaded from http://www.denispetrov.com/format144/format720src.zip . How difficult would it be to modify the Format720 program to low-level format LS-120 (or LS-240) diskettes?

3.5" floppy disks formatted to 1.2MB under WinXP a) Formatting VGACopy, after some tinkering, CAN format, under WinXP SP2 on my old 700MHz laptop, 1.44MB floppy disks to 1.2MB format on a regular 720KB/1.44MB floppy drive. The 1.2MB format (80 tracks, 15 sectors/track) is the format of old 5.25" floppy 1.2MB disks. Formatting a 3.5" floppy to 1.2MB allows to work with a 5.25" look-alike in a 3.5" drive, under WinXP. b ) Reading and writing Once a 3.5" floppy disk is formatted to 1.2MB it can be read and written to Ok with other applications under WinXP, e.g. Beyond Compare. To avoid that WinXP crashes "chkdsk b:" (or a:, etc) should be entered right after inserting the odd-formatted floppy disk, to clear the drive. Unfortunately 3.5" floppy disks formatted to 1.2MB do not work in an LS-120/240 drive under WinXP, only in a regular regular floppy drive. Under WinXP Windows Explorer (except for its format facility) and Beyond Compare work fine with a 1.2MB formatted floppy disk in a regular floppy drive A: and a 360KB formatted floppy disk in an LS-120 drive B:, copying, deleting, comparing Ok from one drive to the other. Under WinXP

Old floppy disk formats (360KB, 160KB etc) under WinXP a) Formatting VGACopy, after some tinkering, CAN format, under WinXP SP2 on my old 700MHz laptop, 720KB floppy disks (or 1.44MB floppy disks with a taped left hole) to most old diskette formats on a regular 720KB/1.44MB floppy drive. Unfortunately VGACopy does not work with LS-120/240 drives, only with a regular floppy drive. I have not yet tried to get VGACopy to work under WinXP on my 2.2GHz dual-core desktop with a bfg 7800GS card. b ) Reading and writing Once a floppy disk is formatted to an old format (360KB, 160KB, etc) it can be read and written to Ok with other applications under WinXP, e.g. Beyond Compare. To avoid that WinXP crashes "chkdsk b:" (or a:, etc) should be entered right after inserting the odd-formatted floppy disk, to clear the drive. SuperDisk drives (LS-120/240) read and write floppies with these old formats much faster than regular floppy drives. Working under WinXP on these old floppy formats with an LS-120/240 drive seems to be more stable than with a regular floppy drive. Some regular floppy drives sometimes refuse to read odd-formatted floppy disks, for unknown reasons; LS-120/240 drives always work fine with odd-formatted floppy disks if you run chkdsk after inserting the floppy.. Under Win98 odd-formatted floppy disks have issues in a regular floppy drive, much less so under WinXP and in an LS-120/240 drive. WinXP seems to be preferable to Win98 when reading and writing odd-formatted floppies (except for 1.2MB formatted 3.5" floppies, see posting below). Win98 is preferable for formatting odd-formatted floppies, unless VGACopy can be used. BTW, the 360KB floppy disk format (40 tracks, 9 sectors/track) is the format of old 5.25" floppy 360KB disks. Formatting a 3.5" floppy to 360KB allows to work with a 5.25" look-alike in a 3.5" drive, under WinXP.

Hi jaclaz,Thanks for the correction. In my comment in the previous posting I just wanted to point out the default format info taken from the media byte. Thanks for the link. Can FORMAT720 do any tricks which the tools below can't?Tools to format 720KB floppies under WinXP 1) Matsus***a SuperDisk Format Utility - works only in a SuperDisk (LS-120 or LS-240) drive - you must NOT enter a Volume Label into the field "Volume Label" and must NOT select "View Result" - if you enter something into the field "Volume Label": at end of a full format, you get the err msg: "Error Message. Can not create a volume name. No disk is in the drive or the disk is protected, or the drive does not work well." - if you enter something into the field "Volume Label": at end of quick format, you get the err msg: "Error Message. Can not create a volume name" - if you do not enter a volume label, but select "View Result", you get the err msg: "Error Message. Can not get the disk information" 7/18/2011 - works fine with bulk-erased floppies 2) command window prompt: - "format b:" formats an already low-level formatted 720KB floppy; the 720KB format type is read from track 0 - "format b: /t:80 /n:9" formats a bulk-erased 720KB floppy 3) WinImage v8.5 under WinXP CAN full-format a 720KB floppy, in a regular 720KB/1.44MB floppy drive, in an LS-120/240 drive and in a BUSlink USB floppy drive, IF you set: -> Options -> Settings -> Disk tab -> de-select Verify writing if "Verify writing" is selected, however, you get a lot of err msgs like: "Error. Disk error on track 1, head 0. Floppies do not match" 4) VGACopy after some tinkering 5) Format720 (added to this list on 22-Jul-2011)