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From: nerd@percy.rain.com (Michael Galassi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Floppy Drives
Message-ID: <1991Jan11.051258.27303@percy.rain.com>
Date: 11 Jan 91 05:12:58 GMT
References: <1991Jan9.122039.10078@investor.pgh.pa.us> <1991Jan10.130434.19994@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Percy's UNIX, Portland, OR.
Lines: 44

In article <1991Jan10.130434.19994@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu> tgingric@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Tyler S Gingrich) writes:
>In article <1991Jan9.122039.10078@investor.pgh.pa.us> rbp@investor.pgh.pa.us (Bob Peirce #305) writes:
>> ...  Therefore, who has
>>suggestions for an economical floppy drive so all us OD users can load
>>the present and future new software?  Economical, to me, means a couple
>>of hundred bucks, complete.  Anything like that out there?

>Improv will be released on 1.44Mb floppy diskettes -- and, unfortunately,
>there is no CHEAP floppy drive solution on the market......

>Pacific Micro Devices has an external drive that will read 720, 1.44, & mac
>disks (but not 2.88s).                  

I have not yet tried this on my NeXT but under SCO Xenix '386 many tools
like tar, cpio, and the dos floppy maninulation programs are happy working
with a file created by reading the floppy on another machine with dd.  It
works something like this:

on machine at work with floppy drive:
	dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~uucp/disk.out
	uucp ~uucp/disk.out [home machine without floppy]
at home:
	tar tvf ~uucp/disk.out
produces listing as if I had done this directly from the floppy.

I would guess this should work if the instalation programs used by
2.0 are flexible enough to recognize diferent sources.  I could
then use my Xenix 1.44 meg floppy at work to create all my files
and uucp them to my NeXT at home.

In NeXT's flier "Upgrade Options for Current Users" they talk about
the "PLI SuperFloppy 2.8" as a NeXT-compatible floppy disk drive. It
is not cheap (~$500) but in the long run is probably worth it.  For
your reference, PLI can be reached at (800) 288-8754 or (415) 657-2211.
They have not returned 2 of my calls (I even left an 800 #) but that's
life.  PLI does not include a SCSI cable so you will have another $50
added to all that.

Ingo's solution (roll your own) seems like a good one.  The one thing
that was not obvious is if this was on 2.0 or 1.0a.  Ingo, I'd love
to hear more details.
-- 
Michael Galassi				| nerd@percy.rain.com
MS-DOS:  The ultimate PC virus.		| ...!tektronix!percy!nerd