Date   : Sun, 13 May 1984 04:19:42 CDT
From   : Stan Hanks <stan@rice.ARPA>
Subject: Help with Siemens FD200 drives

As I was in the market for some DSDD 8" drives, I bought a pair of
Siemens FD200 drives from JDR Microdevices, and persuaded a friend of
mine to do the same. We got the beasties in late January, but due to
the usual academic pressures, didn't have a chance to play with them
until this week (making them long out of warranty).

My friend runs MS-DOS on a Seatlle 8086 S100 board set; I run CP/M 2.2
on a highly modified Heath H89. We both have problems getting  the
disks to perform in a sane fashion. As nearly as I can tell from the
manual, they are correctly strapped. The symptoms are that every so
often the  drives do not correctly recognize various sectors for either
reading or writing. If this were more persistent, I would be tempted to
so that one head or another was not correctly functioning; however,
they do work after a fashion and that would seem to indicate something
more intermittent.

A friend thought that he recalled an article or letter in one of the
popular magazines (Byte?) that claimed disfunctionality with the FD200
drives, and proposed a fix for this. Does anyone either have this
information, or have any additional information thatt might be of help?

Any info is appreciated; assuming that none is forthcoming, anyone want
to buy 4 8" floppy sized paperweights?????

                               Stan Hanks
                               Department of Computer Science
                               Rice University
                               Houston TX
                               
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