[Coco] 5 1/4 drives on the PC

Briza bpa65117 at bigpond.net.au
Mon Aug 6 11:01:54 EDT 2007


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.
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.
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)
Anyone else has this kind of problem free experience?

Diego


I have also used a 1.2mb drive to make real coco disks or read real coco disks.
 What I have found is that setting the BIOS to 720k 3.5" DSDD will allow the 1.2mb drive to work with coco format. As I have had no luck what so ever getting a real 40 track DSDD drive to work on my Pc. And I think you need to have a drive that can be jumpered to go from 360RPM to 300RPM. Cant use a drive that does not allow this.
 And I did this in Win98se using DSKINI.EXE and RETRIEVE.EXE or DK's emulator. 
 But those days are gone now. I use a 1.44mb drive to make coco disks now. As I find that using this type drive in WINXP using OMNIFLOP or VCC emulator is more reliable.
 Also doesn't it depend on the Floppy controller on the Pc if it will work or not. There is 1 certain brand that will not work no matter what. It does not like formatting track0. But all other tracks will be formatted right.

laters

Briza



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