[Coco] trouble writing disks

[Joel Ewy]

mike delyea wrote:
> 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.  
Mike,

You didn't mention whether you have tried different floppy disks.  It
just sounds like a bad disk to me.  You do mention that you appear to be
able to read the file back from within RS-DOS, but obviously there is
something wrong, and the error message is pretty specific.  A different
floppy might work.  Weirder things have been known.

It does seem odd that this problem crops up using the self-same floppy
drive.  So often this kind of thing is a result of the track alignment
and who-knows-what-all else not matching up between two different drives...

JCE
> 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 ;)
>
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