archive.worldofdragon.org

Best of luck!

Keep us updated.

Well it seems that my Dragon single disk unit is faulty

Hooked it up to the computer tonight for the first time and it made a constant buzzing noise. Upon trying to run a DIR command on an inserted OS9 disk I am getting a SK? error, which I am assuming means seek error.

I popped the top off the disk drive and i can see the drive head is not moving at all. It is spinning the disc fine and I can see the rubber belt spinning at the bottom but the drive head doesn't move at all. I can manually move the drive head forward and back, so it is not jammed. I am guessing that a possible motor fault or maybe a belt or something. I have yet to strip it down to get a better look at how it is assembled at the bottom.

Will update once I've investigated more

John

Vato wrote:Hehe, it suddenly appears to me that it has been a loooong time since I have used floppy disks..... I can't remember if I can take High Density (HD) disks and format them as Double Density (DS).

So the question is: can I take disks marked DS/HD and format/use them as DS/DD with the Dragon?

I'll answer my self, for future reference for others

No, High Density diskettes will not format in my Double Density drive I actually thought they would......

That seems to work with 3.5" disks but not with 5.25" ones.

Are you using a Dragon disk drive or a standard 5.25" PC floppy drive?

There are DD and HD drives, though HD drives are by far the most common type.

Rob,
I'm using an old DD PC drive. I do have a newer HD PC drive as well.... Maybe I should try that....

Well, the High Density drive seems broken, with similar symptoms as Stig is referring to further up here. SK Error, disk spinning, head not moving (but not jammed, as it moves freely when pushed). I guess some of my 3.5" drives are the next up

I don't know if it's really necessary, but you may need to put some tape on the right write protection hole, to maje the drive think you're using a DD 3,5" disk.

robcfg wrote:I don't know if it's really necessary, but you may need to put some tape on the right write protection hole, to maje the drive think you're using a DD 3,5" disk.

I found a 3,5" drive that works with the DragonDOS controller! I looked through some old boxes of 3,5" PC diskettes, and collected all DD disks I had. It was quite a lot. Lots of old driver disks, MS-DOS installation discs etc. Things I will never use again. The DragonDOS was actually able to format both sides (something I actually didn't expect) so they can store 359424 bytes each. I think I have enough disk space now

....and since I have Tormods uDW, I can now easily transfer the .vdk files in the archive to floppys, using the V2FLO dweeb by pser1. I love it! It's like the Dragon has a new life!

Actually, you can format 3.5" disks up to 720Kb using DSKINIT drive,2,80.

Glad to hear you got it working!