[Coco] IDE internal 100mb ZIP drives

[Ray Watts]

Mark,  I screwed up royally.  Turned on the CoCo for the first time in 
about seven months to get your ident and realized I ran into the same 
probem.  I rationalized by going from ZIP to floppy on the same machine 
and started checking out pcdos to correct it (7+ months ago).  Searched 
frantically for the notes I took and just spent several hours working 
from there.  

Realizing that when Bob Santy wrote pcdos, noone would ever expect to 
transfer data from media larger than 720k, I searched the module for the 
1440 sectors or 737,280 byte limitations.  Also for formatted DOS 1420 
sectors and 727,040 bytes.  No luck.  I have no idea what identifies 
media as being formatted under MSDOS, so didn't look much further there.

Next, I printed out dumps of the directory sectors of both 720kb 
floppies and 100mb Zips both blank formatted and formatted with files. 
 Will spend some time looking at them, but what really struck me as 
strange is that the first floppy sector has no similar features as the 
first ZIP sector.  No wonder ther is an identification problem.  Will 
continue to look for something that can be tweaked so the ZIP will be 
identified.  Won't be easy, though, because the biggest ZIP is what I 
know about MSDOS, or anything by Bill Gates.

I deeply apologize for the misinformation I have been spreading.  I 
guess I thought it was going to be a cinch when I broke away from it. 
 Well, at least it got me back to working with the CoCo ... and enjoying it!

Cheers,  Ray


Mark Marlette wrote:

>Ray,
>
>Could you please ident your PCdos utility for me and report your
>findings. My PCdos WILL not talk to a ZIPdisk, it tells me that it is
>not a MS-DOS disk. So I'm curious on the differences.
>
>BTW, SuperDriver is out of this world. It is nice to have a driver that
>can sense the drive(s). No more parameters to set up, it even figures
>out the clustering for you. Of course you need to be running the latest
>NitrOS-9 to have all of these nice features.
>
>TIA,
>
>  
>