hideehoo
Experienced Member
Just wanted to share my experience with this. Things went better than expected and my son now have a number of new disks to play with in the Model II.
I have the later rev drive controller card, so I simply unplugged the 50 pin connector from the TRS-80 card, and plugged in into the FDADAP. I left the drive in the Model II and used it to power the drive during the imaging process.
My imaging PC was an old Abit AX5 (Intel 430TX chipset) motherboard running Windows 98. I set the drive to a 1.2MB 5.25" HD Floppy in the BIOS, connected the B: floppy connector (before the twist) to the FDADAP and run TESTFDC from a pure DOS environment with a blank floppy in the Model II drive. Initial results were not good when connected to the motherboard floppy connector.
So I threw in an Adaptec AHA-1542CF, moved the floppy over to it, and much better results.
After that it was simply modifying a few setting in IMD
and away we went.
The NOS Verbatim disks I bought off eBay were hit and miss. Some worked great, others required multiple write attempts and when I removed the disk you could see radial grooves from the head and magnetic the coating was separating. Cleaning the head afterward produced quite a bit of brown "gunk" on the swab. Anyone ever try the IBM Office System 6 disks?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-IBM-8-Floppy-Diskettes-Pack-of-ten-NEW-Office-system-6-/281755990740
The index hole looks like it's in the single sided position and I'm pretty sure IBM used soft sectored disks in that application.
I have the later rev drive controller card, so I simply unplugged the 50 pin connector from the TRS-80 card, and plugged in into the FDADAP. I left the drive in the Model II and used it to power the drive during the imaging process.
My imaging PC was an old Abit AX5 (Intel 430TX chipset) motherboard running Windows 98. I set the drive to a 1.2MB 5.25" HD Floppy in the BIOS, connected the B: floppy connector (before the twist) to the FDADAP and run TESTFDC from a pure DOS environment with a blank floppy in the Model II drive. Initial results were not good when connected to the motherboard floppy connector.
So I threw in an Adaptec AHA-1542CF, moved the floppy over to it, and much better results.
After that it was simply modifying a few setting in IMD
and away we went.
The NOS Verbatim disks I bought off eBay were hit and miss. Some worked great, others required multiple write attempts and when I removed the disk you could see radial grooves from the head and magnetic the coating was separating. Cleaning the head afterward produced quite a bit of brown "gunk" on the swab. Anyone ever try the IBM Office System 6 disks?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-IBM-8-Floppy-Diskettes-Pack-of-ten-NEW-Office-system-6-/281755990740
The index hole looks like it's in the single sided position and I'm pretty sure IBM used soft sectored disks in that application.