• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

External 720K floppy drive IBM XT

robbo007 said:
Would be good to see what floppy drive controllers everyone is using here. To see if it's a compatibility issue. I'm just surprised that so many drives are showing the exact same problems.
Click to expand...

All PC disk controllers are NEC 765 at their core. They may have extra registers and add-ons, but the basis and pretty much the programming is the same. The one good thing about PC designs. Of course, modern PCs don't have legacy floppy controllers...

Seems to me that the OP hasn't replied to this thread lately, so he's either ignoring posts or he's already solved the issue.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Okay, so where are the results from Anadisk and IMD? We've told you how to figure out what the problem is.
Click to expand...

Hi Chuck, I've ran the floppy disk created on the external drive through AnaDisk

Give me a "Failed recalibrate" on the drive and disk. I don't see it even reading the disk. No lights go on the drive. Just fails straight away. hmmmm Could this be due to the use of external drive and the DRIVER.SYS ?

Reading the disk on Anadisk on another system I get:
Double Sided Double Density
Interleave:1:1
Side 0 sectors ID 1-9
Side 1 sectors ID 1 -9
 
Last edited:
I've ran the XT diagnostics disk and when testing the speed of the drive I get this error: 7303. The formatting part of the diagnostics test for the drive works fine but it then goes on to test the speed. Something that is does not seem to do with the internal floppy drives. Maybe IBM knew about these problems and tested for it?
Any ideas where too find the error code description?
 
Quote Originally Posted by Chuck(G) View Post
Okay, so where are the results from Anadisk and IMD? We've told you how to figure out what the problem is.

If I scan a disk formatted on the external IBM drive under AnaDisk I get errors like:

Read track ID 41, expected 40

on all to about track 48 then I start getting data error.
 
So you get a message like "Read track 3, expected 2"?

I can guess two causes. The first is that your drive alignment is out. The second is that the drive positioner (usually a leadscrew affair) is full of crud, hardened grease, dirt, whatever so that things cannot move smoothly.

If this is a drive that hasn't been touched by anyone with a screwdriver, then the latter is probably the situation.
 
Chuck(G) said:
So you get a message like "Read track 3, expected 2"?

I can guess two causes. The first is that your drive alignment is out. The second is that the drive positioner (usually a leadscrew affair) is full of crud, hardened grease, dirt, whatever so that things cannot move smoothly.

If this is a drive that hasn't been touched by anyone with a screwdriver, then the latter is probably the situation.
Click to expand...

I finally managed to find a post about this over on Vogons. Using good old "Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk" I aligned the drive and now it works perfectly. A note. When using ImageDisk with the external drives you must use the /4 parameter to load it. This way ImageDisk can access your external drive.

Here's the post if anyone has the same problem: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=77145
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top