[Coco] Use Coco and DriveWire to Create TRS-80 Disks?

[Steve Batson]

I recently dealt with this rebuilding on old system I have. I had 1.2
Meg floppy drives that would work fine for windows floppies but would not
read known good CoCo Disks using the Emulator tools. I have a real CoCo
that read them fine. So, since I had several extra floppy drives, I
started swapping them out until I found one that worked. Many of the 1.2
meg floppy dries don't work well reading the CoCo, at least that's been my
experience now and in the past. Luckily, the one I found that works is a
1.2 Meg Floppy drive so I can read both, but I'm not sure it's going to
make a bunch of difference. This system is intended to be an Emulator
system but also designed to let me move data from various medium. It's an
old Celeron System that I put a fresh build of Windows 98 SE, USB Card, 5
1/2 1.2 Floppy drive, CD Burner and an internal USB Card
Reader, that's about it.I can easily move data to/from it via a USB
Thumb drive or CD. Once on CD or USB Drive, I can pretty much get it to
any of the other formats I'd need from my other system. I purposely don't
have this system on any network as I want it totally isolated and
dedicated to emulation and data transfer to and From Floppy for the most
part.



Anyway, a good 360K Floppy Drive may work better if you can't find a
1.2meg that works. Good Luck.
 


> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 11:55:11AM -0600, Rick Thornquist wrote:

> [..]

>> 3. I do have an old 486 with a 5.25 inch drive, and I've tried
many

>> programs to write a TRS-80 disk, including emulators, but none
have

>> worked. I hadn't heard of Imagedisk, though. I tried it and,

>> unfortunately, it didn't work. It might be because it's a 1.2MB
drive,

>> though some of the programs do say they can work with those kind
of

>> drives. I've just dug out an old 360KB drive and will try that
instead

>> -

>> we'll see if that works.

> [..]

>

> Just an "old" system is generally not enough. I think the
capability to do

> read/write FM is important. You need a proper floppy controller on
that PC

> hardware - not easy to accomplish.

>

> See http://www.tim-mann.org/trs80faq.html#[15]

>

> May some information could be useful from my project to read

> "old" OS-9 disks (just the first track was FM recorded) ...
just

> for reference read on at

> http://jk.kom.tuwien.ac.at/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?OS-9DiskRead

>

> Johann