[Coco] 3.5" Floppies on my Coco 3!

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 06 April 2013 06:08:58 Kip Koon did opine:

> Hi All,
> 
> I communicated with my very first two 3.5" floppy drives on my Coco 3
> using Disto's Super Controller tonight!  I put HDBDOS 1.4 DW4 in the
> super controller.  It also has the 80x24 Composite video output
> daughter board with the mono sound output, an RTC and a Centronics
> Parallel port all on the daughter board for those that don't know what
> a Disto Super Controller is.
> 
> I successfully formatted two real 720KB 3.5" disks and one 1.44MB disk
> with the capacity hole covered to make it look like a 720KB disk.
> 
That won't usually last, sometimes not even an hour.  The recording is too 
weak for the magnetic coating of a HD disk and will fade.

> I then wrote a little basic program and saved it onto one of each type
> of disk.  I erased it from memory and read it back into the computer,
> ran the program and it worked great!
> 
> I now have a minimal disk based Coco 3 128KB RAM 6809 based computer
> system running for real!  On with the upgrades!  Hummmmm.  What to do
> first?
> 
> Now I need to get it connected to Drivewire 4 server and have the world
> at my fingertips, then the fun will really begin.
> 
> Oh yea, I'm experimenting with a 4GB disk image file in VCC.  I wonder
> how many days that will take to format!

Lay down the file system structure and verify.  File structure is a few 
milliseconds because hd's are already formatted and just ignore your format 
command.  Verifying is the time consuming part.  I don't verify at all in 
myram, and the formatting of that ramdisk is done on first access, 100 
milliseconds perhaps.  You don't notice unless really watching, that a dir 
/r0 takes a teensy bit longer the first time, but then the next dir /r0 
responds a teeny bit faster.

> I thought I might like to find
> out!  J I dmoded /x3 with 65535 cylinders, 14 sides, and 18 sectors per
> track.
> 
> The last time I had a disk based Coco 3 was no later than during the
> early to middle of the 1980's.  I'm having lots of fun!  How about you?

BTDT, BTTS even.  Great fun always.

Verifying a big HD takes time, many hours to verify a 1Gb hard drive.  If 
you have confidence that the drive is good, perhaps by doing a surface scan 
in a faster machine, I would dispense with the format verification when 
putting one onto a coco, any vintage.

> Kip
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Cheers, Gene
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