[Coco] double sided disks

[Frank Pittel]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 07:35:28AM -0400, RJRTTY at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 7/3/05 3:03:26 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
> fwp at deepthought.com writes:
> 
> << Did you DSKINI 1 first?
> 
> Yes. I get the same error with both the 502 and modded 501 drive.
> >>
> 
>       Did you try using drive 2?    I thought that double sided drive
> use in hdb-dos meant drive 2 was the back side  of drive 0 and
> drive 3 was the backside of drive 1.

That was it!! I thought I tried it last night before sending this email
but if I did there was some pilot error involved because it works fine
this morning!!

> << 
>  That explains it. There's no second index hole in the disks. There should be
>  no problem with using "back side" of the floppy. Afterall it's exactly what
>  a double sided drive would do. >>
> 
>      Not true.    The direction of rotation is reversed.     There is a felt
> liner in floppies which keep the disk clean.     When you flip the disk
> the rotational direction is reversed and all that dirt comes out and
> deposits on the read/write head.    Very bad idea.

I understand that the rotation is reversed but never thought about the liner.
Now that I'm able to access both sides of the disks without flipping the
disks I don't see a need for doing so. A couple of months ago I got a
superide interface from cloud9 and with the CF card that I have plugged into
it I have ~250 virtual floppies free. This means I'll be using it for running
most software instead of actual floppies. I mostly was interested in backing
up the floppies that came with a couple of auctions. Most were double sided
disks and they were flipped to write to the second side.

Frank