[Coco] Another drive question

[Roger Taylor]

At 12:37 AM 12/6/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Roger Taylor wrote:
>>I also thought the low-level sector codes that surround the actual data 
>>has to be specific to the system or controller reading the disk?
>The device driver decides what low-level sector codes are acceptable to it.
>IBM set the standard for 512 byte floppy media, and every one follows that.
>In the Tandy field, the only oddball for floppy formats is the TRS-80 
>Model 1/III/IV directory track.  All other sectors can be read.
>IIRC: They set the Deleted Address Mark on the sectors of that track, so 
>the PC bios thinks the sectors are bad and will not return the data read 
>up to the application.
>Flex-09 has the first track in single density, which is another small 
>stumbling block.  And the only way I see around that is to have the 
>COCO  based program copy it to a double density disk.
>And of course I would use a freshly degaused and formatted floppy for the 
>transfer.  Since the host system can format the floppy, only the 512 byte 
>sector read and write lowlevel functions would have to be coded.



What has me totally shocked is that nobody (apparently) has come up with a 
solution for Windows 2000 and XP to r/w non-PC 256-byte sector floppies 
since 2000 or so, besides these OS9Max foreigners.  Yea, there's probably 
something out there, but searching the net heavily for every keyword that 
could possibly be related to such a project has turned up zilch.

Usually when Windows takes something away or in many cases when they 
haven't yet, somebody gets their revenge by offering a free version of it 
somewhere on the web, and it's usually wide-spread.  Still, no voiced 
solution to the 2000/XP issue with 256-byte sector floppies.

I guess one solution would be to switch over to Linux (in a dual-boot 
system) <-- tee hee, I almost had some of you Linux guys on that one, and 
move CoCo floppies back and forth that way, but you still need to move them 
into the Windows system for M.E.S.S. to use.



{Roger Taylor}