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1000EX not liking anything but 360K drives?

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Dave Farquhar

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the midwest
Question for everyone that's been stumping me for a few weeks. Has anyone ever encountered a 1000EX that just doesn't like anything but a 360K drive? I swapped in a 3.5" drive, and it wouldn't read good 720K disks. It would happily reformat them as 360K disks though. Swapping in a Gotek didn't help; it won't even recognize 360K images off a Gotek running Flashfloppy.

From what I can tell, it sounds like every other 1000EX out there is perfectly happy using a 3.5" drive or a Gotek running Flashfloppy.

Thanks for any ideas anyone can provide.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
Question for everyone that's been stumping me for a few weeks. Has anyone ever encountered a 1000EX that just doesn't like anything but a 360K drive? I swapped in a 3.5" drive, and it wouldn't read good 720K disks. It would happily reformat them as 360K disks though. Swapping in a Gotek didn't help; it won't even recognize 360K images off a Gotek running Flashfloppy.

From what I can tell, it sounds like every other 1000EX out there is perfectly happy using a 3.5" drive or a Gotek running Flashfloppy.

Thanks for any ideas anyone can provide.
Click to expand...
If you're not using a Tandy version of DOS ( 2.11 came with the EX, there is a Tandy DOS 3.3), then you need to use driver.sys to configure the drive parameters so that DOS will see it as a 720k drive instead of a 360k one.

The Tandy versions of DOS contain code to ID the drive correctly on the EX. The EX doesn't have any way to configure the drive size on the system itself.
 
HoJoPo said:
If you're not using a Tandy version of DOS ( 2.11 came with the EX, there is a Tandy DOS 3.3), then you need to use driver.sys to configure the drive parameters so that DOS will see it as a 720k drive instead of a 360k one.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that! I'm using DOS 6.22. I will give driver.sys a try.
 
I have hooked up a 1.44MB drive to a Tandy 1000EX and it acted like a 720K without drivers. It just worked no driver non-sense. The drive was a Teac.
and you can use any version of DOS as well, PC-DOS or MS-DOS
 
Don't use DRIVER.SYS. That's archaic and takes up RAM. With DOS 3.x or higher, you should be able to read and write 720K disks with no special commands or drivers needed. The only problem will be formatting -- it will format the disk to 360K instead of 720K. But you can fix that with SETBPB35, which doesn't take up any RAM:


For example, if your B: drive is a 720K 3.5" diskette drive, use:

SETBPB35 B

Once done, you can then format 720K diskettes in the B drive.
 
The not reading already formatted disks is the thing I’m not getting here. My experience with swapping 5.25” drives for 3.5” ones has always been that, yeah, you will have issues *formatting* disks to the full capacity without a software patch (Driver.sys/Drivparm/whatever), but when reading an already formatted disk DOS will read the geometry information written to the disk when it was formatted and read/write/boot it fine. I used to do this on IBM 5150/5160s (just swap out a drive and go to town with 720k disks formatted on newer machines), and my Tandy 1000 EX and HX that I’ve converted to use Gotek/Flashfloppy units likewise don’t care at all what size disk images I use as long as they’re low density data rate/sector count.
 
Definitely something weird going on. My 1000EX running DR-DOS 6 can read 720K disks just fine, but it does the same thing where the 3.5" drive is recognized as a 360K drive. But nformat can format as 720k just fine, so I never bothered to do anything with driver.sys/driveparm. However, I did have some issues early on where the drive was not doing anything but 360k, and it turned out to be an electrical issue. Cleaning the contacts on the card edge connectors and the cable, and a liberal application of Deoxit solved that problem.
 
Just spit-balling an idea. The Tandy 1000 EX internal floppy header is hardwired to only accept DS0, and DS1 is routed to the external floppy edge connector. DS1, DS2, and DS3 are all floating on the internal header. Most "modern" 3.5" floppy drives are hardwired to DS1, but older drives usually had the same jumpers/switches as the 5.25" drives. If your drive is newer and doesn't have the jumper/switch for changing the drive ID, you'll need to modify a ribbon cable to make it work.
 
I remember us having similar issues back in the day when my Dad had his M24 upgraded with a 3.5" disk drive as the B: drive.

We would have autoexec.bat load the 800 II diskette bios enhancer by Alberto Pasquale to properly deal with 720K formatted disks. As a nice bonus, that tool also allowed 3.5" DD disks to be formatted and recognized with 82 tracks and 10 sectors per track, as opposed to the standard 80 tracks and 9 sectors per track for 720KB diskettes. This resulted in 800KB of storage space a 3.5" DD disk. :)

Maybe this will help with the 1000 EX as well? I also happen to own a Tandy 1000 EX that I'm planning on restoring, so it's good to know about this potential issue. Thanks!
 
Quick question for you folks. If I have a Tandy 1000 ex with internal Teac 360KB drive and an external 360kb 5.25 inch drive, is it as simple as just swapping that external drive to a 720kb and Tandy Dos will recognize it and I don't have to make any other adjustments? I'm just worried about the newer drive having different power consumption that the ribbon cable can't provide, or the machine needs some software to recognize the extra capacity.
 
It should work just fine, that's how mine is configured (360k internal 720k external.) The same BIOS limitation applies, so you probably need to use something like setbpb or nformat to format a 3.5" disk properly.

The EX has a standard power connector for the internal floppy drive, so you should be able to put the 3.5" drive internally if you want to.
 
There's an adapter board in the enclosure that allows you to attach the special cable to the drive.
You'll either need to modify or build something to adapt it from the 5.25 to the 3.5 drive.

It should work no different than the factory original 3.5 external. The original Tandy dos 2.11 has no problem with recognizing 720K drives.

Or buy something like this.
www.tindie.com

Tandy 1000 EX/HX External Drive Adapter's by Cybernetic Systems on Tindie

Add a Virtual FD or Floppy Drive to Tandy 1000 EX & HX's Externally!
www.tindie.com www.tindie.com
He also sells cable kits...all high quality stuff.
 
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