[Coco] Connect CoCo Floppy drive to Windows PC

[Fedor Steeman]

Thanks Gene, but I don't think it will be a problem. My sole intent was to
read disks with this drive using Omniflop, not to write anything on them.

Cheers,
Fedor

2009/1/17 Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net>

> On Saturday 17 January 2009, Fedor Steeman wrote:
> >Hi Gene,
> >
> >2009/1/16 Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
> >
> >> 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.
> >
> >Hmmm.... Are you saying I had better use a 80 track drive? Or just proceed
> >with caution? I have plenty of dispensible ol' diskettes to test with...
>
> It is an 80 track drive, but the drivers will if the os9 descriptors are
> set
> correctly, double step the drive so as to stay in the center of the wider
> 40
> track drives recorded track.  It is NOT safe to write to a 40 track
> formatted
> disk with that drive, so the caution is to treat 40 track disks as
> inviolately read only.  They will be trashed by a write in an 80 track
> drive
> when next they are read in a 40 track drive because the read will get both
> the old and new data.  Very confusing.
>
> Not also that this (48 tpi vs 96 tpi) situation only exists in the 5.25"
> drives, the 3.5" drives are uniformly 135 tracks per inch, and formatting a
> 35 or 40 track format just doesn't use all the disk as they can usually
> reach
> 83 to 85 tracks if you want to play with the descriptors in os9.  The coco
> will not know the difference, relying entirely (in os9) on the data in
> Logical Sector Number Zero (LSN0) to ascertain what sort of a disk it has
> in
> the drive.  Basic of course is pretty much hard coded as issued, and that
> disk format isn't file structure compatible with os9.
>
> That is also 2 different problems.
>
> --
> Cheers Fedor, Gene
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable Unix network is no
> challenge.
>
>   -- From a Slashdot.org post
>
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