Greaseweazle External 5.25 Adapter 

Definitely Mr. Wizard vibes, too

Just start. Today. I would explain how but something I wrote was eaten by the RU-vid bots. Sad really, nothing offensive was written.

@@bluephreakr I used to have MXLinux on my mobile station a few years back. We've got Ubuntu workstations at my workplace, so might as well use it more than testing different distros.

That doesn't surprise me only because the GreaseWeazle is how I get adf files on to a disk to use on my Amiga. WinUAE is used for so many things when it comes to the Amiga.

I didn't actually think to check if that was the same as the IBM pinout, that would be awesome if it is, I don't know if those drives are that common but that would be nice if so!

@@TechTangents Years ago, I had the official IBM external 5.25" drive kit for the PS/2. Contained a adapter that plugged directly where the second 3.5" drive would go which attached to a ribbon cable that went to a dummy Microchannel card with the DC-37 plug. The external drive was built like a tank (typical IBM) and had it's own built in power supply.

Why not use an adapter?

Not sure what "the originals from Japan" means, but from my (limited) understanding of Japanese, there's really no way to end a word in a hard consonant "k" sound. In the basic sound primitives, there are vowels, the lone standalone consonant (that is, 'n'), and (what would be, in English) two- and three-letter combinations like 'wa', 'do', 'shi', 'kyo', etc.. So, for a native pronunciation of "Teac", it would end up being "te-a-ku" (phonetically, "teh ah ku") or something similar. That said, AFAIK, the official pronunciation is "TEE-ack". I'm sure "TEEK" reads correctly somewhere in the world, but in US English, that would be either "Teec" or "Teak". Although I'm not sure what the origin of "Teac" actually is, and standard English rules (insofar as such a thing even exists) may not apply, so anything's possible, I guess.

In Japanese, teac is not pronounced as teek. Tee-ack or tee-ak is the closest. When written in katakana, it is "ティアック".

In general you can read a 360k floppy fine in both a 360k drive and a 1.2M drive but because the 1.2M drive will have a head half the pitch of a 360k drive, 360k disks written in a 1.2M drive may not work well in 360k drives or even another 1.2M drive.

I have done it with the Greaseweazle using a 360k drive to a 360k disk before but I probably wouldn't use this setup for writing disks with the 80 track drive since writing 360k disks is more useful. But writing flux back is definitely possible. I've read that it's not preferable to do it since you are combining the timing tolerance issues of the original drive that wrote the imaged disk and your drive's own tolerance issues. Personally I would still do it but just be aware of what problems can happen.

I did that with my GreaseWeazle. I use it was a 3.5 disk drive. Bought an enclosure that houses the GreaseWeazle and the disk drive. It's nice.

💯% my thoughts :-) make a nice power input on the back, maybe even put a step down in it for good measure and use a 12V wall wart only 🤩 But yes, this would maximize usability at the cost of defacing the original external drive enclosure… So I can understand why it’s not done.

Some 5.25" drives also need 12V for the stepper motor.

@@wmlindley Easy to solve with a step-up converter, as long as the USB bus provides enough watts. And the little board looks like it still has plenty of space for that. And even if not enough USB power, you can always go USB-C 😎

kubuntu

Aaaand - I did it. Pretty useful GUI. I wonder if they will expand the image database.