Format UltraSpeed on Happy?

[+Larry]

I have need to format 5-1/4" disks in UltraSpeed format, using a 1050 Happy.

 

I'm sure that an US blank formatted disk can be copied with the Happy in several ways, but that is pretty slow just to format a disk. (Although if you had a pre-Grass Valley upgrade 810 -- up to about mid-1982, you might disagree.)

 

You can also set the 1050 Happy to US emulation, but I've had no experience with US emulation beyond that. (If I format a disk under emu, will it be in US?)

 

I also have some (mostly German) Happy Utilities, and one of those might do it, but most all the instructions are in German -- anyone used these that might know if there is a solution to my issue in there?

 

There was a commercial program that did this from Innovative Concepts, but I've never been able to find one of those, and I even wrote to the guy to buy one about the time that he exited the Atari business.

 

I can slug my way with trial and error through most of these, but thought someone may have crossed this bridge before...

 

Thanks,

Larry

[+Larry]

Well, I've found one way that appears to work -- RealDos has a utility that reprograms a 1050 Happy to be a USD drive. Thanks, Google!

 

I booted RealDos and loaded HAPPY.COM from the REAL directory, and chose the menu item to turn the Happy into a Doubler. Followed the prompts (all very clear, BTW) and formatted. It was very quick. Booted MyDos with the drive still programmed as USD and did a FORMAT /N to write a new VTOC and blank directory. Probably can write an Atari Dos VTOC from RealDos, but I didn't see an obvious way to do it. (?) Wrote new MyDos files to the formatted disk and it clearly wrote in US! YES!

 

Perhaps there are other ways to do this?

 

And thanks, Steve Carden!

 

-Larry

 

Edit -- setting the drive to US Emulation in the Happy Backup Utilities will not format a disk to US skew. Tried and failed!

[1050]

Interesting, I've no experience in this area myself, other than it sounds like just UnHappying the drive is NOT a solution to the problem. RealDOS wouldn't contain the MyDOS smarts it needs so a separate program would be needed and I'm thinking you've already hit on the fastest fix with the /N switch in a MyDOS format, no matter what size disk it should work out fine. That's not an easy option to write into a stand alone program either. I can only recommend that you pull a directory on the target disk just before you FORMAT it with the /N switch in order for MyDOS drive tables to be updated with the proper disk size beforehand. It doesn't matter if the directory on the Sparta formatted disk comes back with the wrong free sector count, the drive info has been updated and that's all we need done with the directory pull. You should find some data on the disk left over from the Sparta format as well, but it's been slated to be overwritten by the MyDOS VTOC so it really doesn't matter that it's there, just don't be surprised to see it still there when using a disk editor. And that would be another custom program to fix that too. Learn something new around here every day, thanks Larry.