[Coco] Read Coco floppies in my PC

[Frank Pittel]

I remember back in the day when there was a lot of talk about the problem that
never had any issues with it on my computer. It had a 360K drive and a 1.2 meg
drive and the 360K drive never had a prob reading disks written by the 1.2meg drive.

That of course was me and those two drives though! I make no claims about other drive combos!!
It's also been a long time since you've used a floppy on anything but my coco and I'm
moving towards drivewire as fast as I can!!

The Other Frank


On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:02:22AM -0400, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> Your results are atypical.
> 
> The problems between 1.2mb drives and 360k drives are very well known.
>  This used to be common knowledge, but I guess its been a good long
> time since anything regarding floppy disks was well known.
> 
> For instance, this microsoft article details the problem:
> 
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/79538
> 
> You will find further documentation in the wikipedia article on floppy disks:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#5+1.E2.81.844-inch_floppy_disk
> 
> The crux of the issue is that 1.2MB FDD use a narrower track than 360k
> disks by design.  The read head on a 1.2MB FDD can easily read the
> wide tracks written by a 360k drive, and it can also read the narrower
> tracks written by 1.2MB drives.  However, 360k drives cannot usually
> read the narrow tracks written by a 1.2MB drive.  This means writing
> to a 360k disk with a 1.2MB drive generally renders the disk
> unreadable by 360k drives.  This is a physical property of the write
> head and not something changeable via software.
> 
> 
> ..
> 
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 11:53 PM, Chad H <chadbh74 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > I have 9 360k pc-xt drives, all fully tested to read/write disks formatted by 1.2 mb drives without problems....?????
> >
> > Michael Graham <mkgraham at gmx.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Just FYI, most double-density (360k) drives won't read double-density
> >>disks written on high-density (1.2M) drives.  I tried this when I first
> >>got my PCjr, and it didn't work, so I had to swap the 360k drive back
> >>and forth between my PCjr and my old desktop machine until I could
> >>source another 360k drive.  I couldn't get disks written in a 1.2M drive
> >>to read on my CoCo, either.  However, disks written with a 360k drive
> >>will read back just fine on a 1.2M drive, as long as you don't try to
> >>write to them.
> >>
> >>On 3/30/2012 8:20 PM, Bill wrote:
> >>> The drives I just got are 1.2Mb, and I have tried several times to format a
> >>> 360K disk, but for some reason it won't let me. I type in the command format
> >>> b: /f:360 (which SHOULD work), but it gives me an error message.
> >>>
> >>> Has ANYONE been successful formatting a 360K disk in XP with a  1.2Mb drive?
> >>>
> >>> Thanks
> >>>
> >>>
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> >>
> >>
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> >>
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