[Coco] Drive info

[Mark J. Blair]

Opening up the drive and looking at the head(s) is the easiest way to see whether it's single or double sided, unless you have some need to determine it from within a program.

To determine how many tracks the drive has, that will probably need to be done with a program that tries to step the head inward enough times to hit the inner mechanical stop, and then see how many steps outward before the track 0 detect signal is asserted. I've been doing that for new drives I get with my KryoFlux because it happens to have easy functions for counting tracks and measuring RPM, but I think it should be possible to write a program to do that on a Color Computer.

Between the two single-drive CoCo drive kits I've bought recently, one drive could hit track 39 and the other could hit track 41. One was part of an FD-500 and the other was part of an FD-501, and they had different brands of drives in them. I doubt that Tandy cared how many tracks the drives could hit as long as they could get up to at least 35.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/