[Coco] Trouble writing to CoCo floppies from PC

[Bruce W. Calkins]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Goerzen"

> So I have now managed to read all my CoCo floppies on PC, and I'm now 
> trying
> to write some CoCo floppies.  This is proving harder.
>
> I used DSKINI.EXE from the COCO2EMU suite.  It went through the motions 
> and
> seemed to work, but the resulting disks produce I/O errors on the CoCo.
>
> I had to set the BIOS to 720k instead of 360k for reading.  I also did 
> this
> for writing, because at the 360k setting, it would appear to work fine for
> the first few tracks, and then generate a write error starting at track 16
> on any diskette I used.  (At the 720k setting, it appeared to write OK.)
>
> Is there a CoCo program that could, say, read a DSK image from audio and
> write it (slooooowly, I guess) to disk?  I don't have a CoCo serial cable,
> so I'm just wondering how I could get these wonderful CoCo programs that
> I've downloaded to the CoCo.
>
> -- 

Using Jeff V's <PORT> with Windows 98 in DOS mode it worked "better" if I 
formatted (DSKINI) the disk on the CoCo then <PORT> on the PC.  However I 
often needed to do it several times before getting a good copy.  One other 
method that had better results was to use 720k 3.5" disks in both the PCV 
and CoCo.  I could then (BACKUP) the 3.5" disk to a 5.25" disk on the CoCo. 
However using 3.5" disks on a CoCo has some other little gotcha's to avoid. 
Newer 3.5" drives can be nearly impossible to set up for the CoCo.

Bruce W.


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