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Can you make me an image of the disk that fails the media test? The media test just writes a solid 8us pulse and reads it back. This is as basic of a write test as you can get.
Have you written any disk format successfully using your SuperCard Pro board? It could be that the interface is not allowing the board to actually write to the disk. Imaging the disk you ran the media integrity test on will tell me a lot.
I sent an email asking about buying the adapter board a couple of days ago, but I have not yet received a response.
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(08-19-2015, 09:46 PM)admin Wrote: Can you make me an image of the disk that fails the media test? The media test just writes a solid 8us pulse and reads it back. This is as basic of a write test as you can get.
Have you written any disk format successfully using your SuperCard Pro board? It could be that the interface is not allowing the board to actually write to the disk. Imaging the disk you ran the media integrity test on will tell me a lot.
I sent an email asking about buying the adapter board a couple of days ago, but I have not yet received a response.
I've sent you a pair of images, one of a disk that fails the media test, the other an attempt to duplicate a disk.
We've used the SuperCard Pro to read/write 5.25" and 3.5" media successfully. Aside from the double-density 8" disks I've been primarily focused on, I also attempted to duplicate a single-sided, single density (DEC RX01) floppy with similar results. I can't find the images I made of it, if you want them I can capture some more images next week. I don't have anything here that's got anything more odd than a standard IBM 8" format, really...
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I looked at your images (sent you an email about it). Your drive has a problem with head 0. You can see from the flux data you sent using the editor/analyzer by clicking on the "Display Flux" button. The flux data is randomly sprinkled with bits that should not be there. This is very common with bad media. It could also be due to a dirty head. Are you cleaning your heads with alcohol and soft cotton? That's not an option when it comes to imaging old magnetic media!
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(08-21-2015, 04:38 PM)admin Wrote: I looked at your images (sent you an email about it). Your drive has a problem with head 0. You can see from the flux data you sent using the editor/analyzer by clicking on the "Display Flux" button. The flux data is randomly sprinkled with bits that should not be there. This is very common with bad media. It could also be due to a dirty head. Are you cleaning your heads with alcohol and soft cotton? That's not an option when it comes to imaging old magnetic media!
And I just sent you a reply
.
I am cleaning the heads thoroughly after every read, I'm not new to this game
. I get similar results with different drives (Qume, IBM 9331) except they have errors on both heads, not just head 0. As I've noted, I'm able to use these same drives and media with ImageDisk to duplicate floppies without errors. I've sent along a few more images for comparison.
Thanks,
Josh
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It's pretty clear that there is a problem with the data as can be seen by the flux display. What are you connecting the drive to to use "ImageDisk" ( I am not sure what that is)?
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(08-21-2015, 09:04 PM)admin Wrote: It's pretty clear that there is a problem with the data as can be seen by the flux display. What are you connecting the drive to to use "ImageDisk" ( I am not sure what that is)?
ImageDisk is a DOS utility (read more here:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm). It uses a standard PC FDC to read/write floppy disks; it can read disks in a wide variety of formats (but obviously limited to soft-sectored formats written by the original
765 / WD 17xx/27xx controllers. This is still quite a bit of media, just not things like Commodore or Apple formats...). It's proved extremely useful (though a bit more cumbersome to use than SuperCard Pro, since I need an old DOS PC to use it.)
Specifically, I'm using ImageDisk in tandem with the FDC on an old ISA Adaptec 1540-series SCSI controller as it's quite a bit more flexible than most modern FDC controllers in PCs, but it's still just a normal 765-compatible PC floppy controller, nothing exotic. I've read/written many 8" floppies with it and never had an issue (aside from old 8" media delaminating, but that's another problem entirely.)
Thanks,
Josh
