[Coco] So, does anyone know where to get disk drives?

[Al Hartman]

I would check with Art Flexser to see if he still offers ADOS. I believe 
that not only does ADOS allow you to easily set parameters for each drive, 
it should let you tell a drive to skip tracks so you can read a 40 track 
disk in an 80 track drive.

But, I would never write to a 40 track disk in an 80-track drive. I would 
copy the disk to a blank, bulk erased floppy and write to that. You want 
there to be no remains of the wider 48tpi track on the disk.

I just kept my 40 and 80 track drives to the media and disks they were meant 
for. Less hassle that way.

I think Cloud 9 still has floppy drives. I recently picked up a bunch of 
bare drives on eBay. Finding cases is a bear, however.

Power supplies are easy. You can find the units used with those USB to IDE 
cables with the 4 pin connector for under $10.00 from surplus sites. I've 
misplaced the link, let me know if you need it and I'll get it from my 
friend.

Al



-----Original Message----- 
From: Christopher Smith
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 7:28 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] So, does anyone know where to get disk drives?

Hey Joel,

Now that I think of it, how would this work from RSDOS?  The drives would be 
operating at 300RPM, but unless the media selector were in the correct 
state, they would still think they had a high track count, right?  ... so 
that RSDOS would write tracks too close together to work with disks made on 
other CoCo drives?  I suppose one could do something either in hardware or 
software to hit the density selector and set it appropriately.  Do they also 
have a jumper for this?  Wiring a switch into that would be an easy 
solution.

Chris