[Coco] Floppy drive/OS9 issue

[Andrew]

All,

As some of you may or may not know, I am involved in a project to help 
convert some 400+ disks over to emulator formats. Normally this wouldn't 
be a problem, but in these early stages I have found something out that 
I didn't know before, and I am wondering if there is a solution of some 
sort.

I am at a point in the project where I am verifying/checking-out a bunch 
of OS-9 floppies. My main problem is that some of these disks are two 
sided, and OS-9 L2 is complaining when I stick them in my drive, with an 
error #249 "Wrong Type", which according to the manual may mean they are 
double sided (one of the floppies was marked as double sided, so I am 
assuming for now this is the problem). Other OS-9 floppies read OK.

Let me give you a little background on my drive situation, though. When 
I first had my Color Computer 2, I had a tape drive (this was about 1984 
or so, and I was about 11 years old). About a year later I was given a 
floppy drive by my parents. It was an FD501 system, with the single 
half-height drive in a dual drive cabinet. A few years later I upgraded 
to a Color Computer 3, and a little after that got a 512K expansion 
(third party, but I can't remember who, just not the RS one).

In high-school my drive controller died (still don't know why, and I 
still have it). I managed to get from a friend an FD502 controller 
cartridge. My drive worked at that point.

About 10 years later I get all of my Color Computer stuff back from my 
parents house. I plan to do a conversion of my software to work on 
emulation. I try my drive, and it won't read anything. I purchase a 
drive off of a guy on ebay to replace the one I had. It works great, and 
I finish my conversion project.

I was never an OS-9 fanatic, but I now want to get to know it better, 
since I didn't when I was younger, and I kinda need to for this floppy 
conversion project.

So, here I am trying to go thru these floppies last night, and I am 
running into two issues - sometimes I need a command module which isn't 
loaded, so with a single sided system I am needing to swap floppies, and 
the other issue is that I have floppies that are double sided. I figure 
"hey, bright idea - I have another 5.25 drive in my shop (don't we 
all?), maybe it is double sided?" - thinking I will add the drive, and 
all will be well.

I pull the drive out, and it is double sided - but it won't hook up to 
my system! Basically, it will plug in, but I can't use both drives 
because of the way the connector is configured and the cable connectors 
in the case - the one drive in the case has the connector on one side 
facing in one direction, and this other drive (by a different 
manufacturer) has it on the other side oriented differently - and the 
cable that goes in has the connectors space about an inch apart, can't 
twist them much, etc. Drats!

Well - I figure I will just plug the new one in, and it will at least 
give me a double-sided drive, fixing one of my issues, hopefully. I try 
it out, and it doesn't quite work right - If I issue a DIR 0 (or just 
DIR) no action. But issuing a DIR 1 works OK. I take another look at the 
drive, and sure enough, there are a set of jumpers marked D0, D1, D2, 
and D3 - and the jumper is on D1 (interestingly, there is another set of 
jumpers labeled U0, U1, and U2 - the drive is a TEAC FD-55BR). I assume 
(though I have yet to try it), that if I pop it over to D0, it might 
work OK (?). But what about my other drive (the one I have been using 
for the past few years)? Does it have jumpers?

I look at the drive closely, and I don't see any, but it has a cover 
obscuring the drive electronics. The cover looks like it is meant to be 
removeable, so I remove it carefully. What I see shocks me a little bit:

...An upper drive head!

All this time - the drive has been a double sided drive! But it doesn't 
seem to work as a double-sided drive! It only sees a single side. I also 
don't see any obvious jumpers. It is a CHINON FZ-502.

So - after all this, my question to all of you guys is: what do I do?
I have the folowing drives:

	CHINON FZ-502 (acts as a single sided drive, but is double)
         TEAC FD-55BR (works as a single sided drive, but may jumper to 
double)

Personally, I would like to have them both working, and have two double 
sided drives in my system (at some point in the future, when cloud-9 
gets going again, I plan on getting a hard drive controller). It would 
make my OS-9 world much easier to work in, and would make this 
conversion much easier.

Does anyone have any ideas on this - does anyone have any information on 
either of these drives or how I can/should set them up? Also, can I 
still buy the connectors that are on my cable to crimp my own custom 
cable so I can hook these drive up - what kind of connector is it (can I 
order it from DIGIKEY or someplace)?

Any information posted will be appreciated! Thank you,

-- Andrew L. Ayers
    Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona