Looking for Heath H89 software and some advice

From: Dave Baggett <dmb_at_itasoftware.com>
Date: Wed Dec 1 12:07:52 1999

Dwight Elvey <elvey_at_hal.com> wrote:

>Before anyone can help you, you need to find out if the
>drive is soft or hard sectored.

Dwight (and Tony), thanks for the info.

It looks like both machines have only a hard sector (H17)
controller. All the disks I have are hard sector disks. It's
a bit mysterious why none of the HDOS disks will boot,
but the CP/M disks will. I would suspect bit rot, but when
I check out the CP/M format disks, they *all* seem to read
fine. I wonder if it has to do with the drive's rotational
speed? I'd like to calibrate it, but I'm afraid doing so
might destroy the disk I put in there. BTW, is there any place
left that sells hard sector floppy disks?

Or perhaps the CP/M file system had more error correction,
and thus CP/M is better able to recover flaky disks? These
disks are all 20 years old now, after all...

Dave
Received on Wed Dec 01 1999 - 12:07:52 GMT