Speaking of vintage hardware.. and vintage floppy disks. I got a device from UK called kyroflux that is a USB attached floppy controller interface. It is interesting in that it digitized the flux signals directly from the floppy interface and sends it to the PC over USB. This makes it possible to not only to read pretty much any format or protection method, but allows for more advanced software to try and recover sector information that is damaged.

I was able to get it up and running with a Fujitsu 360K floppy drive and read and write raw images from both DOS and TRSDOS floppies.

There is another tool called HxC that can build the flux patterns from an image file (that you can edit, add files etc), and that pattern can be written back to the disk.

A really useful tool if you have a stack of old floppies laying around you want to read from, especially if they have errors. Support for HD drives (1.2M ones), and of course all of the 3 /12 and 8″ formats.

It is interesting to look at the raw flux streams and see how tenuous floppy magnetic medium is. I have to admit I am surprised it worked as well as it did for so many years!