[Coco] Read Coco floppies in my PC

[Chad H]

Ok, further experimentation with the RETRIEVE from the CoCo 3 6309 emulator
package has shown the following...

(Disks were formatted in a real CoCo unit)

*  Side 0 RETRIEVE's just fine on PC.

*  Side 1 fails at first..but after I try DIR B: on the PC, which results in
"GENERAL FAILURE READING DRIVE B:", then I can RETREIVE B: /2 BLANK.DSK and
it works just fine... huh?

Any ideas anyone?
- Chad

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Chad H
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 5:42 PM
To: 'CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts'
Subject: Re: [Coco] Read Coco floppies in my PC

Yea that would explain the behavior I've been experiencing.  I guess I will
just continue to handle the problem as always...either working with disks
already formatted by the PC DSKINI utility, or using a CoCo to BACKUP to
such a disk.

Thanks.
- Chad

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Darren A
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 5:37 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] Read Coco floppies in my PC

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Chad H wrote:
>
> I've always had a peculiar behavior between my CoCo Drives and my 
> MS-DOS system with DSKINI/RETRIEVE....
> When I DSKINI a disk on the CoCo system, the RETRIEVE on the MS-DOS PC 
> would have errors reading it. No other problems have been encountered
anywhere!
> The same disks read/write fine in all my CoCo Drives.


This is a known problem with some PC floppy controllers.

When you format (DSKINI) a floppy on the CoCo, it puts a fairly small gap
between the index hole and the first sector on each track.  The Western
Digital chip used in CoCo controllers has no problem with this small gap,
but some PC controllers will turn off their address mark detectors for a
short period following an index pulse.  This causes the PC controller to
often miss the address mark for sector 1, resulting in I/O errors.

The solution is to always format the disks on the PC since it will place a
gap at the beginning of each track that is large enough for both the PC and
the CoCo.

Darren

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