BBC Micro DFS Format problem

[cjlt]

I've just bought a BBC Micro complete with 5.25" and 3.5" drives.

It has Watford Electronics DFS v1.43. This allows 62 files and has Form40 and Form80 commands in firmware, thank goodness as I don't have a Utilities disk.
But, while Form40 and Form80 work fine on 5.25" disks, they fail every time with every 3.5" disk I've tried. They step through to the very last track, then report error 10 at 4F/00 (or 27/00 in Form40).
Any thoughts, please?
All my disks have previously (mostly several years ago) been formatted on PCs. Could this be causing problems? They are all DD, not HD.
I've tried reading them on a PC with OmniDisk and it says some of them have been overwritten and aren't formatted correctly, but it can't find fault with others.

Thanks for your time
Chris

 

[carlsson]

I think Omnidisk is supposed to be able to format those disks as well? I can't remember if I formatted my few 3.5" ADFS disks on my BBC or with Omniflop (XP). Just an idea, if you haven't tried it already.

 

[cjlt]

Thanks for the help Anders.

I've made a bit more progress. I can now format 3.5" disks on the BBC, thanks to the *FX255,207,0 command mentioned at Sprow's Website.

But I can't then read these disks on my PC. Which is frustrating as I want to be able to download files from the PC to the BBC by sneakernet (walking from one to the other with a diskette in my hand).