[Coco] Get those hard to find disks...

[Derek]

When I have used disks that give me a problem and will not format I use Darren's Coco disk program here : http://www.coco3.com/users/DarrenA/?M=A

I just run a quick format with that program and then I can use the disks just fine. Really works well for using MS-DOS formatted disks that will not run initially on my Amiga and Apple Macintosh SE as well. I just use the program to do an 80 track Double sided format and then the disks are usable on the vintage platforms.

Its also a great tool to write coco disk images to a real floppy but it does have some problems with some of the coco disk images that are 219K (I believe that's the size)

BookWorm <bookworm at cavenet.com> wrote: > I use a 1.44mb 3.5" floppy drive mounted with my FD502 5.25" drive without 
any problems at all.

I've kept my FD-502 original. It's in perfect condition, and kind of cool. I 
get two DSDD drives in the space of one of the competition's drives, who I 
won't mention by name because I've picked on commodore enough already.

I like, and intend to keep, my 5 1/4" drives. It's a combination of nostalgia 
and compatability. Of course, I only use them for backup, etc., and installing 
software. I have a big hard drive and a couple of Zip 100's.

> I find floppy
> disks all the time at local thrift shops (not blanks but can be formatted 
easily).

So do I, but I've been having a lot of trouble with bad disks. How do I tell if 
it's the disks or the drives? My 3 1/2" & 5 1/4" were salvaged from discarded a 
Tandy 1000 and are mounted in an FD-500 (the connectors are compatable and it 
had to be upgraded to double sided anyway.) The cable is unshielded, and I 
don't really know how to test a drive. What if the test disk is bad?

A bulk tape eraser does help this problem a lot, but it doesn't fix everything.


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