Are Floppy Drives Supported?

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Well, that didn’t help at all. SIGH.

I should probably recycle this old junker and try to put Haiku on a “newer” one, but… this is where all my BeOS stuff is right now.

Why am I even bothering? This doesn’t accomplish anything for me. I hate computers. I used to enjoy messing around with stuff like this, but it’s more about endless problems than having fun. It’s not like I have any reason to USE Haiku. It’s just curiosity to see how the BeOS successor has progressed since my BeOS days (and damn was BeOS important to me at one time!).

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Ref: #9109 (usb_floppy doesn't function and causes kdl when unplugged) – Haiku

Floppies are still used for archival retrieval purposes and maintaining legacy computers/hardware. Some businesses and end users still run legacy software with files still on floppies. Heck, I see companies still running pre-Y2000 OSes.

Our archival media libraries retain some floppy units for extracting data from floppies.

Support for floppies as an OS default is out of scope nowadays so third party driver development/support is a more viable solution…

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23

I set up a much newer PC that can boot from USB… and when the thing recognizes a boot volume, which takes several retries, it indicates the boot partition of 2.88MB, puts one dot on the screen and then hangs.

I apparently am NOT going to be running Haiku on THIS machine EITHER. What a waste of time.

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Well, that my involve some specifics about the machine(s), about how are you creating the usb drive, bios configurations, etc.

You know enough about computers to avoid the most blatantly errors, so there may be some tiny detail you are overlooking that is causing you these problems.

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I can’t even get the boot loader options. I don’t know where to start troubleshooting this one. I don’t even want to.

This is why I don’t do computers as a hobby much anymore. EVERY SINGLE STEP made to try to solve a problem or work around a blockade runs in to some other problem or blockade. Who finds this fun after a couple of decades? Hobby/alternative OS stuff isn’t for me anymore. I just want crap to work without perpetual faffing about.

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Ok, I understand the issue. As you said some place, maybe better to work with photography, music, etc, since those things do not ( yet ) fight us back. :slight_smile:

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Oh I get plenty of fight from various audio/photo products, but they’re generally more of a “why did that happen” type of annoyances, often resolved, rather than a 100% failure… but still plenty of fight and frustration. Like I said: I hate computers anymore; I wish I grew up focused on something else, but here I am; everything I do is with computers.

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As long as you have USB floppy support that covers most of the PC archival front… and the more complicated disk imaging tools like greaseweasel or Fluxengine can handle the preservation of older disk images. (KryoFlux is also a thing but proprietary tools need to go away, the developers are too self absorbed).

USB floppy support can also work with superdisks also… eg some of the old floppy cameras have superdisk USB floppy support.

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If only we could just move into a cave and leave technology behind forever. But we live in a technological world now. However, if you want stuff to “just work”, I suggest macOS or Windows 11. However, that won’t help you as far as getting a floppy drive to work these days (well, maybe, in the case of Windows 11). You really need to just transfer your data from floppy disk to a FAT32-formatted USB thumb drive or similar. Floppy disks are like a sinking ship… get off before you drown. :grin:

I have a bunch of floppies with PC apps and stuff on them. I also have a bunch of Atari Falcon030 floppies. I’m not worried about copying the data off of them because those days have passed. I have no interest/need to run old software anymore. The oldest software I run nowadays is iPiano for MacOS X. And it’s saved to USB thumb drives and a few of my other computers, in case my G4 QuickSilver drive goes belly up and I need to reinstall it on a new drive. I only keep the floppies for nostalgia sake. To remember the good times I had running those programs “back then”. But I’ve moved on otherwise.

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I’m a Mac user at this point. It’s no longer a case of everything “just works” anymore, though. That stopped around 2013.

I have most stuff on something modern, but I have several classic computers that have diskette drives and they’re still somewhat necessary for those machines. I have modern storage on almost all of them, in the form of IDE to SD/CF. Only my old Umax Mac lacks an easy modern device (I can’t recall if Mac OS 8.x supports USB sticks), but I am planning to replace the hard drive with an IDE to SD device soon. That has both Mac OS and BeOS on it.

The Intel BeOS machine (the subject of my involvement in this thread) has no way to get data in and out of the BeOS drive without LS120 disks. USB sticks don’t work with it. I’ve never gotten USB mass storage to work on BeOS. if anyone has a proper solution for BeOS R5 and USB mass storage, let me know.

BeOS is on a SCSI drive, which Haiku doesn’t support. While Haiku Alpha seems to handle USB sticks, those cannot be read in BeOS, so the data needs to be moved by LS120 disks.

I can’t install Haiku Beta 4 on this machine because I cannot boot the DVD (the BIOS doesn’t support booting from USB). That’s why I resurrected this thread. I need a diskette-bootable option or a CD-bootable option. I’ve still not solved it.

I might just get another IDE to SD device and move everything to that, and say screw SCSI on that machine, but that’s a lot of effort for a screw-around hobby PC for retro/alternative OS computing, and it still doesn’t solve the lack of booting from USB DVD. The newer PC that DOES boot from USB DVD freezes on Haiku’s boot loader, as stated earlier up thread.

You still have an Atari Falcon? I wish I had gotten one of those while the second hand market had them, at a sane price for hobbyist stuff. My Atari is an ST4. Lots of diskettes involved, there, but mostly for transferring small things, as I have an UltraSATAN for SD cards-as-hard drives/mass storage on there (clunky startup, if I recall correctly - it’s been months - I think it needs a boot diskette to switch ROMs and activate hard disk drivers, but it gets the job done).

It’s all so stupid and pointless really :sweat_smile:

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Uh, no… I have a bunch of Atari Falcon030 floppies. Why the floppies without the computer? I don’t recall… oh, yeah, because they’re backups, not the originals. I sold the originals with the system. :grin:

But, however you can, get the data off those floppies and onto more modern media. In a worst case scenario, I’d .ZIP the programs/files on the computer that will read them and then Email them to myself. That way, I have the programs, even if I can never use them, at least I still have them… kinda like my Falcon030 programs on those floppies. :grin:

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I have gotten USB mass storage working on BeOS, the files were: usb_scsi-1.1.0-alpha-1.zip and BeOS-USB-patches.zip.

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Do you know of a specific repository where these can be found?

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I got it from here, try searching for USB.
This for usb patches, and this for USB storage.

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Thanks for the links. I looked at the info…

“WARNING! To apply this patch you will need change some system files! This can ruin your system! Do not experiment with this stuff on your working systems! It is the good idea to have another copy of BeOS installed to be able roll back changes made during this update!!! You are warned!”

“ reboot your computer and pray … If boot fails - try to reboot again. If all is OK - now you should have working USB. If system crashes on boot anyway - boot in safe mode with disabled user add-ons and roll back all changes that you made. It is not your day, sorry …”

Sigh. This would probably explain why I never installed these things before. I am just not motivated to deal with this. I don’t want to break the existing BeOS installation.

I miss when computing felt fun. Now it just feels like endless problems and broken stuff. Tedium. I mean, it was that way back when computing was fun, but then it stopped being fun because it never progressed beyond the tedium and the fighting to get things to [occasionally] work.

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When I installed it, I followed the instructions carefully, and nothing broke.

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I’m glad :slightly_smiling_face:

I don’t enjoy my life’s “luck” trend. I’ll pass on this. But I will keep the links just in case. Thanks again :+1:t4:

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Don’t forget that in the quarter of a century since the BeOS heyday you have changed a lot as a person and the World around you has changed a lot. The lack of fun ain’t just because things have become stupid but also because as we age we can’t be bothered messing about with things as much. And because the modern World is so hectic and mad there’s no time or mindspace for mindless things (is that logical?). Some of the things I used to do for fun on BeOS I don’t particularly want to do now, not least because there’s no time. In the nineties there was a lot of slack time and there was a lot of boredom. Who has slack time anymore? I also wonder if we sometimes mix our nostalgia about past computing experiences with our nostalgia about our previous lives in general and get the two confused. I used to hate the boredom I felt in my younger years (before-Internet) but now I sort of miss it.

I don’t know how old you are. I’m fifty-five. Older people are more tedium-sensitive I think. :slight_smile:

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I’m 48. I have a lot of time to mess around with things because I’m subsisting on disability. I think I agree with most of what you said, even though I do have the free time.

I’d rather mess with synths and try to record music or play No Man’s Sky than to fight with equipment and software that was marginally functional even when it was new. Still…

Nostalgia for those times is definitely a powerful emotion. I wouldn’t have half the room dedicated to classic computing otherwise. Thing is, I hardly use any of that stuff :sweat_smile:

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Same age here. I love a good challenge, but only if it makes sense. Trying to get an Atari ST online or making BeOS R5 useful today would be a pointless venture. I can’t even get MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) to go online anymore. I only use my G4 Mac for one thing… for making music with iPiano. Period. I enjoyed my times with the older Power Macs, but their days have passed. My Atari 1040ST and Mega ST4, and Falcon030 all had their time, but those days are behind me. Nostalgia is best left in the mind. Trying to “relive” the past rarely works, unless you only use the software or play the games those systems worked with back then. And, even so, I only enjoy playing Adventure (Atari 2600) for a few minutes in an emulator (Stella) before I get bored and want to go back to something TODAY, not yesteryear. The memories are fun, but I’m a person who lives for what I can do today, not what I did decades ago.

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