Date : Tue, 15 May 2012 09:01:03 +0100
From : jim@... (Jim Hearne)
Subject: Torch discs.
Well....
I took the 5.25" drive out of the BBC external housing, changed the drive
select jumper to DS1 (as the PC likes).
Found the correct IDC connector for the 5.25" drive and crimped it onto the
existing floppy cable before the twist.
Fitted the drive into the PC, put it all back together.
Powered up, went into the Bios to enable floppy drive B, and found no
options for B drive !!
It seems that most newer motherboards (this one is about 2 years old) have
removed support for 2 floppy drives.
Pretty sure this is just a Bios thing, i doubt if they would have removed
the DS line from the FDC.
Spent the rest of the evening trying to find hacks for the Bios or Windows 7
to let it see the second drive.
The Award Bios on my Motherboard is V6.00PG which is too new for any editors
i could find.
So far the most likely option seems to be to edit the CMOS ram directly to
change byte 0x10 to the settings for 2 drives.
But, changing the byte means changing the CMOS checksum otherwise you just
get a CMOS checksum error.
So, i've got to work that out as well.
Otherwise, i may just invest in a Kyroflux USB floppy interface.
Thanks for the advice,
Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: Jules Richardson
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 6:28 PM
To: bbc-micro@...
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] Torch discs.
On 05/11/2012 10:57 AM, Jim Hearne wrote:
> I'll need to work out what i can read them with since i've not got a
> working
> BBC setup at the moment.
> If i remember correctly, only older PC's can read BBC discs if i hooked
> the
> BBC drive up to a pc ?
It very much depends; in rough terms I've found that there's a 'bad zone'
of several years where PCs of that era tend not to handle FM-density media
at all - but then toward the end of the floppy era things actually seemed
to get better again.
Overall, it's not *too* difficult to find a PC that will read FM - writing
is often a different story, but for the purposes of seeing what's on the
disks that's not an issue.
Imagedisk comes with a 'testfdc' util which will see what a machine's
capable of if you have a known-blank/sacrificial floppy handy, but it runs
under MSDOS so you really need either a second floppy drive (3.5" or 5.25")
to boot from or a bootable copy of MSDOS on hard disk; I'm sure others on
the list can comment on alternatives which run on other OSes.
I'd say hook the drive up and see how it goes...
cheers
Jules
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