[Coco] Disk drive question

Wed Jan 18 21:26:07 EST 2012

I have a question for you gentlemen.  I started work on this some time ago and lost my momentum when i had to attack a project.  Here is the deal.  I have a number of CoCo 2 and 3, and one of the FD-501 sets.   I am trying to hook up a 3.5 along with the 5.25 but cannot get the drives to work properly.  I think i am safe in assuming i am doing SOMETHING wrong, but have no idea what at this point.  It appears that the drives are experiencing addressing conflicts.  But as i said, i am not sure.  You gentlemen have obviously overcome this sort of problem so i was wondering if you could profer some advice to help me get my issue corrected.   Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Pat

________________________________
From: Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com>
To: coco at maltedmedia.com 
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 5:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Disk drive question

Sounds like a winner Gene, thanks. I will give the "complete" cleaning a try. Mike gets back from Mexico on the 1st and will be sending me his boots for the hard drives then. From what he's told me, he's basically left the boot disk in drive 0 forever and just turned on the machine and the Eagle interface would autonatically boot OS9 if you do nothing. Once running he only used the Hard Drives and used the 5.25 80trk (d2) & 3.5 80trk (d1) for ocassional backups. So he mostly worked from the hard drives and rarely used the floppies. He wouldn't have noticed the floppies getting slower as they sat in place for so long. I can say the system was spotless when I recieved it. No dust, no dirt, nothing. The insides of this system look shiney as if they were new. I did get quite a bit of "gunk" off the contacts though you couldn't see it till it showed on the tissue. The keyboard issue is driving me nuts though. Everytime I fix a key, another goes out. If all
 else fails, I'll pull th
e eagle interface and get a Coco3 keyboard from Cloud9 and be done with it.

thanks again
Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3 
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Bill Pierce
ooogalapasooo at aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Wed, Jan 18, 2012 5:56 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] Disk drive question

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012 05:28:57 PM Bill Pierce did opine:
> I've tried the drives in different combos. individually as well. For the
most part I can't even boot from a single drive except for a Level 1
v2,00 system master boot. Seems I read somewhere long ago that the RS
factory disks were written to in a manner that even if your drive was
in slight miss-alignment that in most cases the disk would read. This
was for the fact that no 2 drives are exact in alignment and they
wanted no problems. Since the RS disk will boot and no "created" disk
will boot, it makes me wonder about alignment.

light miss-understanding there I'd say.  And the next thing I would do is 
o get one of those shack oilers with the long tube & a cap on the end of 
he tube. Its even got a pocket clip on it. Open up the drive boxes & 
emove the drives and using some painters alcohol, not that imitation stuff 
alled rubbing which is up to 70% water, and some q-tips and clean the gunk 
nd old dried out lube off the shiny rods that the head carriage slides in 
nd out on.  With power off, you can slide that back and forth and clean 
ntil they are "lox clean".  If the drive has a motor with a long spiral 
ut screw for a shaft on the back of the drive, clean that screw till its 
lso shiny all the way to the bottom of the groove.  Then apply a couple 
rops of that oil and work it back and forth till its well distributed. On 
he screw drive too if the drive has one.  While you are that close to it, 
he heads can also be cleaned, but get a fresh q-tip for every time you wet 
t with the alcohol, never putting a dirty q-tip back in the alcohol to 
ontaminate it.  It goes w/o saying that head cleaning s/b done gently so 
s not to spring the head suspension.
Put it all back together and see if it will work.  I'd bet the stepper 
oise the drive makes is a lot louder because it can now move easily and 
uickly from track to track, where before it was quiet, sort of ooozing 
rom track to track and possibly/probably losing steps.  It _should_ be 
asily heard.  
Quiet drives are a sign of impending, if not current, trouble.
I have a tube/needle of that oil here, with about 20 drops left in it, 
ushing 25 years old & blacker than coffee from all those years of light 
xposure, but it still works.

hat I'm using for clues here is that it won't read a disk created in it.  
f the head can slide easily enough, then it should be able to read a disk 
ade in it better than any disk made in another, possibly draggy drive.  
his will not make it read a disk created before the above maintenance 
hough, because that disk will probably have the tracks quite a ways out of 
ilter.
Cheers, Gene
- 
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
Ed Howdershelt (Author)
y web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
n general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it
sually is.  :-)
            -- Larry Wall in <1991Jul31.174523.9447 at netlabs.com>
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