5 1/4" Disk Drive Trouble

[VirusVox]

Hey all!

After doing a quick clean up of the interior of my 386 I decided I'd attempt to test the 5 1/4" disk drive within it. I have a box of Tandy 5 1/4" disks which all contain data for my TRS-80 CoCo. I expected the machine to not be able to read the data off of them, but it can't even navigate to the drive. If the disks are label-up it presents a 'Sector not found reading drive B' error, and if they're label-down then I get a 'Not ready reading drive B' error. I attempted to just format one of the disks before navigating to the drive, and it starts to check the existing disk format and then throws up 'Not ready - Format another (Y/N)?'

Is this a simple compatibility issue between these 5 1/4" disks and this drive, or is this a possible dead disk drive?

Thanks!

 

[jmetal88]

Hey all!

After doing a quick clean up of the interior of my 386 I decided I'd attempt to test the 5 1/4" disk drive within it. I have a box of Tandy 5 1/4" disks which all contain data for my TRS-80 CoCo. I expected the machine to not be able to read the data off of them, but it can't even navigate to the drive. If the disks are label-up it presents a 'Sector not found reading drive B' error, and if they're label-down then I get a 'Not ready reading drive B' error. I attempted to just format one of the disks before navigating to the drive, and it starts to check the existing disk format and then throws up 'Not ready - Format another (Y/N)?'

Is this a simple compatibility issue between these 5 1/4" disks and this drive, or is this a possible dead disk drive?

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure CoCo disks use a different file system than MS-DOS. You might be able to read them with a disk imaging program, but it is unlikely you'd be able to read them natively in DOS.

If you'd like to try formatting one, label up is the correct way to do it. They are probably double-density, so I'd try to force the drive to format them as such with a "format /u /f:360".

 

[VirusVox]

Thanks a ton for this! It did, in fact, work on the 2nd disk I attempted to format. The first disk I believe has just gone bad over the years. But now I can re-format my CoCo disks should I need any 5 1/4" diskettes for DOS!