[Coco] Floppy drive

[Robert Emery]

Diego, what kinds of cables are you testing with?
You say one drive works in the PC, have you tried the rest?

If you have a standard PC floppy cable (the old style with
edge and pin connectors) and a 1.4meg 3.5" drive, you can
try the following:
- Use the FD502 drive bay for power, it should have a
plug that fits on the 3.5" drive, red wire to the outside,
yellow wire towards the center. It's not the exact
same plug, but it fits. :-)
- Plug the PC floppy cable edge connector into the
controller and the pin connector at the far end
into the floppy drive (watch Pin1).
DON'T use the edge connector that is after the twist
in the floppy cable, use the UN-twisted section only.

Now, if nothing else, DIR1 (not 0) should make the
drive light up and spin. (MOST, but not all, 3.5"
floppy drives will already be jumpered as D1.

Cover the HD hole in a 3.5" disk and try a format...
DSKINI1. This should tell you if the controller
is good or not at least.

Good luck,
Bob Emery

> I recently bought on e-bay 2 drives for the CoCo.
> 1 is a FD-501, the other a 502
> But the luck that kept me without a floppy for the last 20 years is 
> still there.
> None of them works
> With the 502 controller, the disks won't even spin after a DIR command.
> With the 501 I always get an IO ERROR.
> I tried with different drives and cables, including a drive that, when 
> hooked to my PC, reads the floppies without any problem.
> I've also tested them in a CoCo2 and in a 3.
> Can anybody give me some hope???
> 
> Thanks,
> Diego
> 



		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail