[Coco] Connect CoCo Floppy drive to Windows PC

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 15 January 2009, Fedor Steeman wrote:
>Hi guys,
>
>I have been getting closer to the aforementioned "quest" to connect a CoCo
>5,25" floppy drive to a pc. I have now selected a drive that apparantly can
>be switched between 40 or 80 tracks BTW, so now comes the next question:

Be aware that this is a double edged sword Fedor. The heads on that drive are 
not wide enough to fully erase old info when over-writing in the 40 tpi mode, 
and generally there is a 100% chance of trashing the disk.

>How to connect a modern IDE cable connecter to this old drive?

You don't, it is two entirely different interfaces.  Floppies use a 34 wire 
cable, IDE use either a 40 wire cable or an 80 wire cable, only partially 
cross compatible.

>I have no 
>experience with the "crimping" that I have read about, but it seems tricky.
>What is needed for this? I suppose I need to clip off the original IDE
>connector and then "crimp" and older one on to it. Would I need to twist any
>wires? Or are there any adapters available?

Crimping cane be done with a small vice, or a pair of vice-grips, even a flat 
surface and a house hold 16<->24 ounce hammer will work.
>
>Thanks for any input.
>
>Cheers,
>Fedor
>
>2008/10/5 Darren A <mechacoco at gmail.com>
>
>> On 10/5/08, Fedor Steeman wrote:
>> > The drives are jumperable and they look like they could be used for
>> > (earlier) PCs as well, so I have my hopes up...
>>
>> If you can configure the drive to respond as Drive 1 (not 0) on the
>> CoCo, then it will likely work on the PC in that configuration.
>> Setting a jumper to enable READY may also be required.
>>
>> Go to <http://www.nitros9.org/howto.html#dsk> and use the links there
>> to download the fdrawcmd.sys driver and the CoCoDisk utility. These
>> will allow you to access coco floppies on a Windows XP machine.
>>
>> Darren
>>
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>
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