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EPSON SD-600 5.25 floppy drive help


Frankie

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Has anyone used one of these drives with an ATR8000? I have it hooked up but have no disks to use. Formatting doesn't seem to work correctly. It addresses the drive correctly, it spins up when I try and access a disk. Formatting attempts to do something, but fails with error-138. I can't figure much else out. 

 

Frank

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1 hour ago, Kyle22 said:

Try formatting from SDX as 77 track 8" disk.

 

When I try and format in SDX and specify the drive letter, the drive responds, the formatter comes back (looking ready to format), but then I can't change any of the settings like Tracks and Density. I also don't see anything to specify the size of the disk.

 

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The ATR only does double density (I haven't had mine set up in years).

 

If you want to use a PC 1.2M 5.25" drive, you would want to modify the drive to spin at 300rpm.  You'll have to google that.

 

IBM I believe spins them at 360RPM and uses a modified data rate to read/write DD disks.

 

With the motor at 300RPM you could do 720K on double density media.  (I don't know if you can do this with the drive spinning 360RPM as the drive is spinning 20% faster.... so if being written to as if it was a 300RPM drive you'd probably overwrite the beginning of the track with the end of your track.

 

Though with the right DOS/controller, defining it as an 8" drive (which did spin at 360RPM) (what Kyle22 indicates above) should also work, but I don't know if you can get all 80 tracks or not.

This is something I never tried with my ATR8000.  I used it primarily to experiment with 3.5" drives and 360K drives back when the biggest drive I had was a 1050 with USD.

 

There were quad density 5.25" drives.... these were 300RPM and had the narrower heads of the 1.2M drives.

 

There's something about stuffing 720K of data on a diskette the Atari used to put 92K on that is incredibly satisfying ?

 

 

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