I was down-formatting in a Win98 DOS window with the command 'format j: /f:720 /u' and used nusb 3.3 instead of the manufacturer-provided Win98 driver. When I connected the 5 regular floppy drives listed under b ) to this Cubig USB bridge, they could all down-format bulk-erased LS-120 diskettes to 720KB.

This Cubig USB bridge seems to work miracles. Inside is a regular 3.5' desktop floppy drive Mitsumi D353M3D, a 'Cubig USBFD-1 © 2000' USB to floppy bridge and a small regular floppy cable, to connect the Mitsumi drive to the USB floppy bridge. The Buslink USB floppy drive FDD1 comes in a big enclosure. Teac FD-235HG C628U, P/N 193077C628, rev.A00, made in Malaysiaī ) the following regular floppy drives, when connected inside the desktop, could NOT down-format a bulk-erased LS-120 diskette:īuslink USB floppy drive and Cubig USB floppy bridge Most of my regular floppy disk drives could NOT down-format a de-magnetized LS-120 diskette to 720KB/1.44MB, when connected to the onboard controller of my desktop.Ī ) The following regular floppy drives, when connected inside the desktop, COULD down-format a bulk-erased LS-120 diskette: Regular floppy drives for down-formatting bulk-erased LS-120 diskettes The Imation U2 drives, even if they have a dongle-cable like the M2 and the PPD2, have already the good drives of the 2nd version inside.Īll M3 and U3 drives come with the good second version drives. The only components of an M2 drive which could serve as spare parts for other models are the external power supply, the eject button (requires dexterity to transplant into another bare drive) and the 6 screws of the enclosure.

The Imation M2 is readily available at ebay, but its main components (the bare bad drive and the strange connector+USB dongle-cable) are not even useful as spare parts. I would not use April 1999 drives, except for experimentation.Īll Imation M2 and PPD2 drives seem to come with the bad first version drives of April 1999 inside. No idea what other issues the first version drives have. Drives of the first version (April 1999) canNOT re-initialize de-magnetized LS-120 diskettes, while drives of the 2nd version (June thru September 1999) can. For both versions Win98 displays the same firmware revision. The LKM-F933-1 drive exists in 2 versions: the bad first version, with the sticker on the bare drive displaying a manufacturing date of April 1999, and the good second version with manufacturing dates June thru September 1999. The LKM-F933-1 bare drive comes apparently only inside Imation M2, U2, PPD2, M3 and U3 drives. I have substantially updated posting #88 (review of external LS-120 drives) and added a modded PPD2 drive (parallel port, 2x speed, top DOS drive) to my Toolbox in posting #1.Īn excellent listing of all Matsus***a bare LS-120/240 drives can be found here

Ibm imation superdisk drive ls 120