Bootable disks

[A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security]

>In Mar. 5 (?) Edupage, there's a blurb about a floppy drive that is
>compat with 1.44M disks but can also handle special 80M disks, allegedly
>available in April.

Several years ago Insite had a "floptical" drive that could handle both
regular 3 1/2" and special 20Mb flopical drives. Iomega followed suit and
there was an industry spec. Compression would yeid 40 Mb capacity to
a marketeer. (Can tell a floptical disk easily - the write protect slide 
is on the other side).

Was a great idea then that was marred by U$500 for the drive and U$20 for
the cartriges. Never flew.  

Three years development would give 80 Mb easily (100 Mb Iomega "ZIP" disks
could have been put in a normal 3 1/2 case - is a lot of waste space
on either side. Think it was kind of dumb that they didn't but suppose
there is a marketing reason - probably the same marketeers that insisted
that each new Bernoulli be incompatable with earlier ones.)

Major difference is that the floptical could be made bootable but then
it had a special SCSI card, did not plug into the normal floppy 
controller & have to tell the BIOS that drive B was not there. The card
then added a BIOS extension similar to what I mentioned in an earlier post 
to access the disk.

For that matter, any drive that has a controller on the bus *could* be made
bootable with a PROM. It is only those that plug into the parallel port
- all of which require special drivers - that would need "help".

					Warmly,
						Padgett