Date   : Tue, 05 Sep 2006 23:56:02 +0100
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Re: 3.5" drives & 8271

>Message-ID: <58A7F37A5AF440EDBFAFA822B000CB00.MAI@...>
 
"Ian Wolstenholme" <BBCMailingList@...> wrote:
> can't get any formatters to work properly.  The BBC B Welcome
> Disc formatter goes through the motions but when you catalogue
> the disc afterwards, the title is full of "eee"s (like you get if you
> abort a format before it writes the catalogue) and the catalogue
> is full of "blank" entries.
 
The BBC Welcome Disk formatter is notoriously flakey. It doesn't
optimise the sector skew for efficiant access and the gap sizes
can often result in a track being laid out slightly longer than
will actually fit. The symptons you describe are those of the
formatter not finding sector 00/0 and 00/1 to write the catalogue,
which can happen if the track has been written incorrectly.
 
Try using http://mdfs.net/Software/BBC/FormDFS.txt which has gap
sizes and sector skews optimised.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
BBC IDE Hard Drive Interface - http://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/BBC/IDE