[Coco] drive motors

Darren A mechacoco at gmail.com
Sat Jul 13 11:23:54 EDT 2013


On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Robert Hermanek wrote:
>  < snip >
> Clarification on DSKINI:  What does it do exactly?  As anyone knows that
> listens to their drives, DSKINI sounds like it runs the heads down to one
> end, then slowly ticks through the tracks.  Then their appears to be a
> "stage two" where it again repositions the heads, and runs through the
> tracks more quickly.  Then the process is complete.  If we call this stages
> one and two, then I can say that my DSKINI operation always fails after
> stage 1 -- the heads position, all tracks are slowly advanced through, the
> heads position again, IO error.
>

Stage 1 is where the format is laid down on each track.  Stage 2 is
where it tries to read back each sector on the newly formatted tracks
to see if it was successful.


> Then I gave up for a  while.  More recently, I took a floppy emulator that I
> could not resist buying, and configured that in the exact same fashion as
> the 3.5" drive, and had the exact same result -- it appears DSKINI succeeds
> for some amount of time, then fails part way through.
>
> I'll attempt a link to the emulator:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Updated-Version-SFR1M44-U100K-Floppy-Emulator/dp/B00C4PCK9S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373726291&sr=8-1&keywords=SFR1M44-U100K
>

That particular emulator won't work as it is designed to emulate a
High Density (500 kbps) drive and expects 512 bytes per sector.  You'd
need one that does Double Density (250 kbps) and supports 256 bytes
per sector.

Darren



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