Sounds like an Amiga drive. Canon supplied Amiga for quite some time and they had jumpers for converting between PC and Amiga. Check some Amiga sites for more info. I've got 5 Amiga's all mothballed away! Craig -----Original Message----- From: pic microcontroller discussion list [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Mark Willis Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 12:21 PM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [OT] ... those were the days ... old 3.5" disk-drive Edson Brusque wrote: > Hello Mark et all, > > > Knowing a Make and Model Number on the drive would be eminently helpful, > > Edson If any old 720k drive will do, that's one thing - if it's > > something quite weird, that's another. > > The drive is a CANON molel MD 350 made in Japan. > > I think it's vey strange the capacity of the disk (770KB), maybe it's an > ordinary 720K, but the disk is formated in a non-DOS way? What about the Mac > drives? They where 800K IIRC. > > Brusque OK, I looked and don't see any of those on the 'Net and don't remember a spare of that drive here; You might be able to use "Any" 720k FDD or might not; Sometimes the gears get burred or a piece of grit falls in and locks up the works and that causes FDD failure (I have a friend who used to rebuild FDD's for a living for a while, if you have to FIX this drive, bug me and I'll get him to suggest how to repair it. I'll ask if he has one, also. Remind me of the problems as by then I *should* be on the new e-mail machine and fixing this monster so may not be able to look up old e-mail for a while.) All the Floppy Disk controllers are programmable - You cannot change the usual Sides and number of Tracks (those're sort of "in hardware!") - You can use quite unusual numbers of sectors per track, though, as these drives are all soft-sectored nowadays. Normally, these are the parameters in common use and commonly supported by Dos (From memory, shoot me if it's not perfect ): Size Cap. Sides Tracks SPT 5.25" 160k 1 40 8 (Old Dos 1.x thing) 5.25" 180k 1 40 9 5.25" 320k 2 40 8 (Old Dos 1.x thing) 5.25" 360k 2 40 9 5.25" 1200k 2 40 15 3.50" 720k 1 80 15 3.50" 1440k 2 80 15 3.50" 2880k 2 _ _ (Guessing 80, 30? Never had one.) See DrivParm for playing with this (under Dos, anyways - Dunno on Win32!) My guess is that they used a 720k FDD at 1 side, 80 tracks, 16 sectors/track, to get 770k per disk. It'd probably work pretty well, too, mostly - Have a friend who did that sort of thing a lot (I'm not a great fan of floppies, myself ) You can format disks in the more novel formats with some Dos drivers out there, as well (Should have a copy on an old machine from Back When.) The Mac floppies used a completely different setup (non-constant SPT IIRC) - I've never played with those, mostly due to the price & closed platform choices Apple made, to say nothing of the way they treated their customers on the first RAM upgrade - also the lack of a compiler initially pushed me away strongly. Mark