[Coco] Disk drive questions?

[Robert Gault]

jimcox at miba51.com wrote:
> Hi All!
> 
> Spent some time re-reading the manuals and realize I should have done a 
> better job of reading them the first time through, cause I think I would 
> have stuck with the CoCo longer instead of abandoning it for the Atari 
> ST I got long ago.
> 
> One thing I noticed while going through the exercises in the manual, was 
> once I wound down, and started powering off everything, I noticed that 
> the back of the drive, where the power supply is, was warmer than what I 
> would have expected it to be.  Then again, this IS 20 year old 
> technology that hasn't been powered up for some time.  Any thoughts?

Expect the drive power supply to get warm but not hot. Hot is defined as 
hard to hold for any length of time. If you have any doubts, open the 
drive case and inspect the drive power supply. Look for heat damage. If 
you have test equipment, check for AC on the DC lines; a sure sign of 
power supply damage.

> I'd also like to ask again, how easy is it to drop a 3.5" drive into a 
> system.  I know I have the answer some where in the thousands of emails 
> I have saved, but I thought I'd save time and ask here.  Any pointers?

Should be easy. I've done it with both a medium density and high density 
3.5" drive. Depending on the drive housing, you may need support brackets.

> I know that someone has said that the maximum number of drives in a 
> system is 3, though in the manual, it says the maximum drive number is 
> 3, so if you start with 0, my logic says you can have 4 drives total.

Four single sided drives 0-3 or three double sided drives. The problem 
is that the same line is used for selecting the forth drive and the back 
sides of the drives.

> Is it possible to have two different drive controllers in an MPI and 
> toggle between them?

Not without extensive software and hardware hacks, if you are talking 
about floppy controllers. You can have both floppy and hard drive 
controllers installed at the same time.

> BTW, after all the typing, I now realize how good we got it now on 
> current systems.  Boy, do I sure miss the "up arrow" key.  Cheers!
> 
> Jim
> 
> PS: Anyone heard from Carl Boll lately?
>