[Coco] trouble writing disks

[mike delyea]

Just got my floppy system and I'm having problems getting Jeff's port
program to write to coco disks.  First I formatted a disk with the coco and
then TYPED in the "GETROM.BAS" program, saved to disk, ran it and got the
ROMs.  DSKINI0, DIR0 and LOAD/SAVE "GETROM.BAS" all worked perfectly.  Took
the disk back to my low-end IBM with Jeff's emulator on it and ran port but
it gave me a "READ ERROR ON TRACK 17, SECTOR 02".  Next I used Jeff's dskini
program to format the disk in the IBM and tried to send "GETROM.BAS" to the
floppy but got the same error.  So "port" neither reads nor writes with the
same error.  I am using the SAME 360k floppy drive on both machines - that
is, I am removing and installing the drive on each machine for each
attempt.  Coco reads and writes fine, IBM not so much, and its getting a bit
tedious.  More info that may be helpful.  The IBM is a P1 200mhz with 64mb
RAM.  That era machine has a BIOS that is normally pretty good at detecting
drives but it choked on my 1.2mb 5.25 inch floppy (thought it was a 3.5 inch
1.44mb floppy).  Also, though it correctly detects the 360k floppy, it
refuses to recognize the 3.5 inch drive when both are connected (yes, I
tried a different cable).  Early on in this project I disconnected the
3.5inch floppy and have the 360k floppy plugged into the "A:" position
on the
cable, where it is correctly detected as "drive A:, 360k, 5.25 inch floppy
disk.  I can even format the disk in MSDOS using "FORMAT A:/F:160" and that
works too.  Firstly, is there a command line switch I'm missing with port?
Secondly, I have 3 or 4 other computers of the P3 and P4 variety laying
around, should I give up on the old IBM and try one of those?  More info -
I'm not using the 1.2mb floppy at all, I just mentioned that the BIOS didn't
correctly identify it.  Also I think I've almost spent as much time typing
this post as I did mucking around with the emu and IBM ;)