It's dual floppy drive machine, not sure what type though, I can crack it open to look if it's needed.
So, it looks look I need to make a PCOS or CP/M8000 boot disk? Is there any way to do this under Windows/DOS?
Cheers all.
Hi again,
no problems on the photos.
It is very important to find out what density your floppy drives are. So you will need to open machine and hopefully get the model number data of the drives and try and match that to which of the 3 different size drives that were used, being 160Kb or 320Kb or 640Kb, unformatted.
If your lucky and its a 640KB drive then thats a help in formatting boot disks. I cannot recall if one can format 640Kb floppy successfully at 160Kb. One would expect by the numbers you could, but it maybe a media thing. Certainly if you had original 160Kb floppies I don't believe the magnetic media was capable of double or higher density formatting.
I can recall if you had had a floppy say 640Kb already formatted and had data on it, then you deleted all, and went and formatted it in say a much lower format floppy drive like 160Kb, that you could get errors as the 'lower density' heads dont fully erase the tracks that had been written on a higher density drive, Or something like that.
I was always told to use a magnetic disk eraser to completely wipe a disk, if one was going to reformat it at different TPI (tracks per inch), to give the best and longest lasting data retention without errors.
Second point if you DONT have the "Alternate Processor Board, 1086" that plugged into the motherboard, then as I understand it you can only run PCOS as your operating system, not CP/M8000 or MSDOS.
Maybe someone with a working basic M80 machine can enlighten all of us, if this is incorrect.