stepping machanism of Apple Disk ][ drive (was Re: Heatkit 51/4

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Fri Apr 9 14:31:11 1999

Sellam Ismail wrote:
> To the average end user, the "abort, retry fail" message may as well be a
> string of garbage like "dsfsd, asjh^34\, "(*p,.8IC?".

I mentioned that CP/M has similar capabilities. I didn't mention that it's
more cryptic. A message simply appears:

Bdos Err on A: Bad Sector

(I may have the capitalization wrong) and the cursor sits there.

You can hit Ctrl-C (which does a warm boot -- it quits the program; but the
program may have wiped out the CCP (shell) so it loads a whole new copy of
part of CP/M from the disk, which is even more fun on my machine since if
the disk contains a different version of CP/M than the one in memory, then
the machine may hang).

Or you can hit Return to continue (I don't know if the program gets any
indication that an error happened).

The horrible disk noises that happen before the message appears, however,
would tip anyone off that something is wrong.

-- Derek
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 14:31:11 BST