Date   : Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:46:21 +0100
From   : "BeebMaster" <beebmaster@...>
Subject: Re: floppy discs

Actually this doesn't seem to happen as I've just tried it on my Cumana 40/80
drive set to 40 track and it carried on quite happily after track 39, although
having run
it a few times it seems as if there may be a built in idiot mechanism on
the drive to
prevent the head being damaged because it does give a clunk-click sort of
sound for
every track after 40.

The BBC welcome disc formatter does the same thing.

Best wishes,


Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: BeebMaster
To:  <mike@...>
Cc:  <bbc-micro@...>
Sent: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:02:15 +0100
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] floppy discs

That should be 39 for a 40-track drive using my programme as it 
asks you for the last track to format rather than the disc size.

It sounds like it may be a 40-track drive although you would probably
get a very bad sounding noise once it tried to go past track 40 as the drive
head would keep trying to push itself beyond the end of the drive shaft
(ultimately with disastrous consequences).

If there is no 40/80 switch on the drive then it is probable that it is a
40-track
drive.  I don't recall many official BBC compatible drives which were 80-track
only.

Best wishes,


Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Tomlinson
To:  bbc-micro@...
Sent: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 08:52:25 +0100
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] floppy discs

In article <002901c5898f$02c7bbe0$e63f4e51@...>, Colin
<cwhill@...> writes

>When it runs, it lists all the numbers from 0-79 (although the sound changes
>when it passes 40).

This indicates that your drive is a 40-track unit.  When you run the
formatter program, enter "40" as the number of tracks to format.  Don't
exceed this or you risk damaging the drive.

>As I said, the disks are DD DS 48TPI pre-formatted according to the label
>and have previously been used on a PC with Windows 3.1

They should work fine on a BBC once reformatted.

>Would this make a difference

no

> or would this program "scrub" all previous
>formatting?

yes

>After formatting I have typed *DISK and *VERIFY and get the error 18.

You're trying to run a program called "VERIFY" from disc, as there isn't
one in ROM, and as the attempt to format has failed, you get error 18
(Sector not found). Try entering "40" as the number of tracks to format
as per above.

Can you also lose the top-posting and snip your quotes, please?