[Coco] 5 1/4 drives on the PC

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Quoting Diego Barizo <diegoba at adinet.com.uy>:

> I keep reading about how careful you have to be to use a 1.2 MiB drive
> in a PC to create disks for the CoCo.
> For years now, I've been using one of such drives (Panasonic ju-475-5)
> in any way possible, to create, read, write, update.... my CoCo disks
> without any problem.

Yeah I've had prety much the same experience, with a 1.2M drive,  
reading/writing many different disk formats, though mostly CoCo and  
Dragon disks. Also I have never suffered from any problems with 40  
track disks in 80 track drives on other systems.

Infact it was quite common for systems back in the day to have  
switchable 40/80 drives (perticually on BBC micros, but I used one  
with my Sinclair QL), which would of course also suffer from the track  
thinness problem, however I had not heard of people having problems  
except with CoCos......

I do remeber there used to be issues on PCs however writing 360K disks  
in 1.2M drives.

> I use DISKINI.EXE and RETRIEVE.EXE, as well as DK's emulator. Those
> disk go to my CoCo, were they are used whit out any issues, with files
> being constantly added, erased and updated.

I mostly use linux to read/write complete images, of disks and have  
not had a problem, also I generally format on the CoCo/Dragon and then  
write on the PC.

> Am I very lucky? Maybe the drive is a very good one? Or it's because
> the disks I use are not 1.2 MiB ? (I do use those for PC related
> projects)

Using DD media (as opposed to HD) may indeed be part of the reason  
that you (and I) have not had problems, I know that people using 1.44M  
disks in 720K drives have run into problems in the past so it seems  
reasonable that the same would apply to 1.2s too.

Cheers.

Phill.


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