Posted inInformation Technology

Linux and USB Floppy Drives

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
USB floppy drive

Everybody thinks they are dead, but floppy disks are still around and you basically need a USB floppy drive to use them because modern motherboards don’t have a header connection for the ribbon cable internal drives need. I know own two USB floppy drives because I forgot I had an IBM portable floppy drive buried under a bunch of portable DVD R/W drives behind a bunch of Super Floppies.

Why this post now? I was cleaning out part of a closet in the parents office and found a slinky of 3.5 inch floppies. Yes, I even found some 5 1/4 disks, but did not save those. Mom used to use these disks to backup Quicken files. Early versions of Quicken used to offer the option of backing files up onto floppy disks.

Why Care?

You should read this interview with the Last Person Standing in the floppy disk market. GE has ECG equipment that still uses floppy. There are oscilloscopes and wave form generators on the market today that use 3.5 inch floppies as well.

That thing is currently listed at over $2,000. You don’t throw out a perfectly working tool just because it uses floppy disks. No sir, you keep equipment around to maintain your floppy disks. I’m told a lot of air planes and jets still use 3.5 inch floppies to off-load diagnostic information as well as update firmware.

On a more personal note, I still have at least one Sony Mavica floppy disk digital camera that I love.

It actually takes better pictures than any of my phones. If I need good pictures of something for online use, that’s the camera I reach for. Will really suck when the battery won’t take a charge anymore.

A friend from high school has an ex-wife whose mother bought some kind of sewing contraption that uses 3.5 inch floppies to load patterns. There are a lot of those things out there from that era. Got to wonder just how tightly encoded a patter has to be to fit inside 1.44 MEG and stitch something like this.

Mint Recognizes USB Floppy drive

On one machine it instantly mounted and displayed contents of the floppy. Sigh, remember the days when we had to have a different driver for every mouse?

On another machine running a different version of Mint it simply recognized the drive.

I had to click on it to mount and display the contents.

You Cannot Format Out of the Box

Drivers and software for a regular internal floppy drive will not work on a USB floppy drive.

ufiformat must be installed

You have to use Synaptic (or whatever) package manager to install ufiformat. Don’t be scared by the low version number. This has been rolled into distros for a very long time. I would be shocked if you could find a Linux desktop distro that doesn’t have it in their repos.

Find the Floppy Drive

If you are a command line person you can 

udevadm info --query=all -n /dev/sdc

starting at /dev/sda working your way forward until you find something that looks like a floppy.

TEAC is a big name in floppies. Those of you who like pretty screens can use the Gnome disk utility available on most YABUs.

When you select the device on the left it will tell you the device path as it does for the currently selected drive.

Formatting

Before you can format the device has to be unmounted.

umount /dev/sdc

You may need a sudo in front of that, depending on how the drive was mounted. To low level format the floppy you need one of the following two commands.

sudo ufiformat -f 720 -v /dev/sdc

sudo ufiformat -f 1440 -v /dev/sdc

Of course you need to change the /dev/path to match your own. 720K floppies only have one hole punched at the top.

1.44MEG floppies have two holes.

Now you need to high level format the disk. The first command just performed a low level format just to make sure the media was okay. Now you have to FAT format the floppy.

The line above the first green text shows what it looks like when you successfully high level format the floppy. The bottom of the screen shot shows you a failure. When it comes to really old floppies that have spent a decade (or more) in a closet you should expect the media to be a bit iffy. You know how you can leave a screw driver in a drawer pointing north for a few years and it “becomes magnetized?” Same thing happens here.

You are writing to rust. It can become permanently polarized.

Do not try this with an LS-120 drive. I have them, I love them, I’ve written about them before. That is a different beast needing a different driver, even if you are formatting a regular floppy in it.

Oh, for those who like to screen scrape.

sudo mkdosfs -v /dev/sdc

Don’t forget to change your /dev/path!

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.