On 01-Sep-99, Richard Erlacher wrote:
>I don't know how common they were, but most 8" floppy drives seem to
>have a built-in provision for them.
Sorry, I didn't specify that these are 5.25" disks. I still don't have
anything with an 8" drive.
>Unfortunately, the controllers which operate on hard-sectored formats
>seem to be like hen's teeth. If your system knows what to do with
>these, then you're in luck.
Only my AES box knows what to do with them. I have no way of accessing
the contents of these disks, because the boot disk appears to be DOA.
Are you saying that there are controllers for IBM-PCs that can access
hard sectored disks? How would I know one if I saw one? :)
>Does your system read your data diskettes after you've booted from the
>hard-sectored boot diskette?
No. It only makes it part way through booting. After apparently
reading for a while (14 moves of the head at regular intervals), it
sounds like the drive's head starts shaking back and forth. Either the
disk is bad and it's attempting to read the same data over and over
again, or the boot process is stalling for some other reason. Nothing
comes up on the screen, though, and it makes no difference if a Data
disk is in the other drive.
I'm hoping that the machine doesn't need to have a printer connected to
it to start up.
This machine will find the boot disk in either of its two drives, BTW,
which is kind of neat.
>Dick
--
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hrothgar_at_total.net http://www.total.net/~hrothgar/museum/
Received on Wed Sep 01 1999 - 23:09:40 BST