[Coco] Format problem in NitrOS9 V030206

[Robert Gault]

Bob Devries wrote:
> I have just this weekend changed over to NitrOS9 V 030206, but I' having 
> problems formatting disks.
> 
> The formatter does the physical disk format, and then baulks at the 
> verify pass, and issues a "format aborted BAD SYSTEM SECTOR" on every 
> disk I try, and on both drives.
> 
> Besides that, I'm regularly getting ERROR 251 when I try to read a 
> directory or chd to a different disk. Error 251 is Disk ID Change.
> I don't think I should *ever* get that except in the middle of running a 
> disk related programme, right?
> 
> It seems the formatter problems have not gone away yet.
> 
> Looking at the disk with ded after the failed format, it seems that the 
> formatter fouls up the first two sectors of *every* track! I can tell 
> ded to skip to sector 2 (the third sector), and it will read that no 
> problem, but then fails at the $12 (first sector on side two of the 
> first track). The error given by ded is 251! Why? it *should* be 247, or 
> similar.
> 
> I'd love to have some communication with the NitrOS9 development team 
> about this, to see if we can find a workaround for it.
> 

OK here is what I tried in an attempt to reproduce the error. The 6309 
V30206 zip was downloaded and the 40T, double sided, disk_1 was 
extracted. The image is not a full disk so it was padded to a full 
$5A000 bytes.

The image was transfered from a WinXP PC using OmniFlop to a 3.5" disk. 
The disk was placed in drive1 on a Coco3 system and dcheck was run on 
it. It failed with a 251 error! But wait a minute, Bob only got this 
error when trying to format disks!? Hmmm, I've seen this problem before 
and if I turn off the Coco, re-seat the MPI and disk controller....

Now the v30206 disk passed the dcheck test. I formatted a 5.25" disk for 
drive0 and backed up the v30206 disk from drive1 to drive0. The new disk 
was booted and v30206 was up and running.

Running with v30206, I formatted the 3.5" floppy in drive1 and backed up 
drive0 to drive1. The fresh copy of v30206 on drive1 passed the dcheck test.

I don't know what to say Bob. Can't test a 50Hz system at this end and 
doubt that it would make any difference.