[Coco] Why not 5.25 with XP?

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

David wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I remember somebody mentioning *ages* ago that it's not possible to use 
> Coco disks in a 5.25 drive while running XP

This is true, infact XP won't even let you format a double density PC 
format disk, though it will read and write them, if already formatted.

> I seem to recall there was a technical explanation given relating to 
> hard-coded sector sizes or somesuch which was incompatable with the coco 
> disk structure

That would appear to be correct, the XP (and probably the Win NT, 2000 & 
2003 also), disk driver only appears to be able to read disk sectors of 
512 bytes as standard on the PC, for example I was able to read Sinclair 
QL disks which also use 512 byte sectors but not CoCo or Dragon disks, 
both of whicvh use 256 byte sectors.

There is a custom written closed source (but free registeration) disk 
driver that will read amongst other things CoCo disks....but I forget 
the URL off the top of my head, it was discussed not so long ago here, 
so may be worth searching the archives.

> Is anyone able to shed any light on this, as if the problem is what I 
> barely-remember it is, I may have a possible solution...

That would indeed be cool. Though I have to admit I do most of my no 
native disk reading under Linux, as I personally find it more flexible, 
for this sort of thing. There's also Anadisk, which can make disk 
images, though that only works under DOS/Win95/98/Me, you cold run it 
from a boot disk tho....

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.