Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record

Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by hinkley on Friday January 23, 2026 @03:17PM (#46737319)

There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but sliding the tracks closer together.

There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by userbinator on Saturday January 24, 2026 @12:33AM (#46741330)

Are you referring to 2M/2MGUI? That didn't change the track spacing (which is fixed) but used bigger sector sizes (similar to how HDDs went from 512B to 4K physical sectors):

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how...

(Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by hinkley on Saturday January 24, 2026 @03:24PM (#46747298)

No they definitely did more tracks, but it seems to be a smaller multiplier than I recalled.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...

2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by userbinator on Saturday January 24, 2026 @07:47PM (#46749410)

The track spacing didn't change, but yes, many if not all floppy drives could step the head slightly past the officially supported number of tracks.

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