archive.worldofdragon.org

admin wrote:... one heading for the bin after it crashed its heads and scratched a nice neat circle on the disk surface.

Nasty, but try and rip out anything useful before it makes its last journey.

You can work around the broken disk change line with

floppycontrol --broken_dcl /dev/fd0


something like that, anyway.

Cool - I will look that up and try it - you don't have the /etc/mediaprm settings to hand do you?

I'm not sure I ever configured it properly, just did the appropriate setfdprm and floppycontrol stuff each time. I don't think you ever need to do more than set "ss dd sect=18 cyl=40 ssize=256" and then broken_dcl as above - pretty much as you'd expect.

It'll even format disks for you after that - although IIRC it wrongly reports that it's formatting 9 sectors per track even when it's doing 18.

Depending on what version of fdparm you have, I have whatever is the stock for SuSE 10.0, the following will work....
These go in /dev/fdprm you can the do for example :

setfdprm ddosSS40-5 /dev/fd0

Cheers.

Phill.

admin wrote:They keep reseting pin 34 (DSK CNG / READY) randomly which linux then reports as the disk being changed whilst I try to read it. The jumpers are all set for AT mode working (DS1, DC etc) but I think the sensor needs replacing.

Yeah that sounds like it could be the problem, also check for dry solder joints on the sensor, or if it's an optical sensor, there may be a LED to go with it also.

These are being used on a PC to read Dragon disks -The Dragon uses XT mode (Ready on pin 34 and the PC used AT mode Disk Change on pin 34) - some drives don't have jumpers to change this - hence I have a load of drives for my Dragon which are that old they only operate in XT mode (which is what the Dragon is expecting or at least it seems that way).

I don't think that pin 34 is connected on the Dragon, so I guess either will work since the signal is an output from the drive. Cirtainly PC 1.44MB 3.25" drives work fine (with 720K media or course).

The TEAC drives don't appear to have a jumper to control pin 34, so not sure yet which way they are wired...

Scope the line, change the disk and see if you get a low pulse....if so it's disk change....

I actually tested a bunch of drives on the Dragon this afternoon, since that's what I thought you needed, from your original posts, some of them would read disks I formatted on my known working drive.
But I could get none to format a disk (with Superdos), could just be jumpers need playing with.

However from later posts it looks like you are looking for a PC 360K drive, it looks like several of the drives may indeed be 360K or 1.2M drives, though I want to hold onto the 1.2M drives
Looks like I need to test them in a PC, if I get a couple of workers you're more than welcome to one if you need it.

BTW you wouldn't happen to be imaging the Flex/OS9 disks that recently sold on ebay are you......

Cheers.

Phill.

"BTW you wouldn't happen to be imaging the Flex/OS9 disks that recently sold on ebay are you......"

I *might* be