[Coco] 3 1/2 drive on coco and drive 0-3 on one ribbon cable

[Arthur Flexser]

1.  DECB will only format the first 35 tracks of the drive unless patched.
ADOS-3 (and perhaps some other modified DECBs) has such a patch, but after
formatting 80 tracks under ADOS-3, you still wouldn't be able to access the
upper tracks except under such a modified DOS, or under OS-9.  If you wrote
to such a disk under standard DECB, it would wipe out the portion of the
GAT devoted to the upper tracks and make the disk partially unreadable even
if you went back to a modified DECB.

2.  I think 4 physical drives as you describe would be recognized under
DECB, but you'd only have access to each one as 35-track single-sided
without a modified DECB or OS-9.

Art

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:00 PM, Rietveld Rietveld <rietveldh at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Two questions pls:
>
> I replaced my 5 1/4 drive 1 with a 720k 3 1/2.   When I do a DIR 1 it
> reads the drive, but when I DSKINI 1 it will only format the disk to 158k.
>  Will DECB format the full 720k?
>
> Question two
>
> I want to hook up this dual drive FD502 inline with another FD502 and dual
> drive to have three physical 5 1/4 drives and one 3 1/2 drive.
>
> If I replace both ribbon cables with one from cloud nine that has a card
> conector on one end for the controller and for connectors on the other end
> for the four physical drives will the one FD502 controller and the coco
> recognize this setup as drive 0-3
>
> Thanks
>
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry Passport Red Edition.
>
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