by Wayne Parham » May 30th, 2022, 5:06 pm
I'm cookin' with gas now.
I had a handful of little things that needed to be sorted out. I have two drives - one that works and another that doesn't. I have a box of diskettes that was never opened, but still had a few bad ones. And apparently, I can't see well because I hadn't installed jumpers in locations U0 and U1.
First things first, I took your suggestion, Mike, to start off with a 330K setup. Configured your FDC+ board for drive type 4 and downloaded PC2FLOP for the 330K images.
At that time, my U0 and U1 jumpers were still missing so it gave the same symptoms. Of course, the "progress counter" display went further - to 16.9% instead of 3.4% - but it still shut off the motor and stopped. Eventually, XMODEM got tired of waiting and bailed.
But I went back through the FDC+ documentation and saw mention of U0 and U1, and then found them on the photo. Looked back at my drive and sure enough, those were missing. Put 'em on and restarted to transfer and it went past 16.9%. I knew then I was headed for home.
I ended up making several disks - one with just CP/M system stuff, another with WordStar, and of course, one with Zork.
While doing that, I stopped after making a couple disks to test bootstrap. It worked so I was confident enough to keep going.
I also tried configuration for 1.5K, but had no luck with that. I realized as I was working through this that my media is "double-sided, double-density" but not "high-density" so I don't expect it would work at 1.5K. As I said above, only 70% of my disks worked at 330K. So I may try again later if I can find better media, but for now, I'm calling it good at 330K.
Next was to try the other disk drive. I probably should have tried to boot one of the known-good diskettes I had just made. But instead, I went through the PC2FLOP process. It went through the whole thing but the disk created wouldn't boot. So I then tried to boot one of the known-good diskettes and that didn't work either. I powered-down and started over - just to be sure - but no luck so that meant the drive itself was bad.
Ironically, the bad drive was the one that was shipped properly. The one sent with the heads clamped together was the one that worked. It again proved to me that Murphy's Law is tricky and that luck beats skill any day.
Last edited by
Wayne Parham on August 14th, 2022, 3:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.