Hard sectored 5.25 ?
#1
Hi, I would like to copy my hard-sectored 5.25 diskettes for Northstar Horizon using my Supercard Pro. 
Has anyone experience with this, any suggestions, settings?
Thanks, Wilko
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#2
Right now, hard sectored disks are not supported using INDEX mode. You can however use SPLICE mode and turn off the INDEX requirement in the pull-down menu in order to dump these disks. You can then use HxC Floppy drive emulator to convert the image into a raw sector format for use with emulators and extracting files.
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#3
(12-21-2020, 07:46 AM)admin Wrote: Right now, hard sectored disks are not supported using INDEX mode.  You can however use SPLICE mode and turn off the INDEX requirement in the pull-down menu in order to dump these disks.  You can then use HxC Floppy drive emulator to convert the image into a raw sector format for use with emulators and extracting files.

Thanks for the info. I connected the Shugart SA400 drive to Supercard Pro, but experience a strange behavior. A rescan floppy drives, does select the drive, spins the disk, but will not show the drive in the Device listbox. In drive/disk utilities, I can however do the test that also moves the head. At some point the device does show up in the listbox and I can perform a copy to a file. At some point it also disappears again from the device listbox.  I tried different flatcables, different power supply, different drive select jumpers, other SA400 drives, rebooted the pc and software, checked the termination resitors on the one drive connected, but this behavior remains. Should I try to reload the firmware? Other suggestions?

Thanks,
Wilko
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#4
To my knowledge none of the Shugart SA400 drives have a 34 pin PC compatible interface. How are you even connecting this drive to the SuperCard Pro board?

SuperCard Pro requires a PC compatible floppy drive.
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#5
Thanks for your reply. The Shugart 400 drives I have, (the 5.25 inch model, not the 8 inch SA800), were standard on the Northstar Horizon and my ones have a 34 pin PCB edge connector. I connected using the flat cable that came with the Supercard Pro.
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#6
Interesting. I have never seen any SA400's (which were used on the Apple II) that would work with a PC. Have you verified that these will actually work with a PC with whatever cable you are using? It is my understanding that this is not possible without additional hardware to handle these particular drives.
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#7
(12-23-2020, 08:58 PM)admin Wrote: Interesting.  I have never seen any SA400's (which were used on the Apple II) that would work with a PC.  Have you verified that these will actually work with a PC with whatever cable you are using?  It is my understanding that this is not possible without additional hardware to handle these particular drives.

Your must be right, I 'wrongly' assumed all 34 pin floppy disk controller cables were based on the same standard. After some digging I found that the SA400 use a slightly different pin-out supporting 4 drive select signals and 5, 12 VDC on pin 1 and 4. Most other signals seem to be on the same pin. Thanks for putting me on this track, because I still have to do some work on older S-100 systems and FDC's, and I didn't know of this pre IBM PC 'standard'. I will use the Supercard for the PC generation stuff I have.
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#8
The SuperCard Pro can image anything regardless of the format, it just needs to use a standard PC compatible drive to do it. So, anything you have that uses the SA400 can be copied/imaged with a standard PC drive.
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