800_Rocks Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Hi! I am new to the XF551 drive and to DOS XE. When I run SETUP.COM the ‘Current Configuration’ thinks the XF551 is an AT810 as in the picture. Any ideas why? Obviously the XF551 boots, I have copied a disk, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 (edited) The named active drive type refers to the detected format and first drive in the Atari hierarchy that can handle reading it, you can answer No to the configuration and change it to the other format selections and the active drive type will change accordingly... then you can format and make your own DOSXE disk etc. etc. Once you format and write out the DOS, you just might see something has changed From the File Access menu you may nitialize disks. If you choose this option you will be prompted for the disk drive number, then for a device type--AT810, AT1050, XF551 or SSDD. The AT810 format is simply single sided, single density, or about 88K per diskette. The AT1050 is the Atari 1050 enhanced-density format, or about 12.08K per disk. The XF551 uses a "genuine" double-sided, double-density, full 360K disk format. The SSDD stands for single sided, double density. This lets you create a single sided floppy 180K in size, which can also be booted, read, and written in a 1050 disk drive equipped with ICD's US Doubler, or other single sided double density capable drive. Edited July 24, 2020 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
800_Rocks Posted July 24, 2020 Author Share Posted July 24, 2020 Encouraged by _The Doctor_’s response I tried more things and although I’m not positive of which action helped, I now have the desired change. I responded N (no) to the question (image above) then on the screen asking me for drive numbers I entered instead the numbers corresponding to the ‘drive types’. See the next two images. Of course you must Save a new DOSXE.SYS to preserve all this for the next boot. So when I entered ‘3 2 1’ I was indicating that drive 1 is of type 3 (XF551) and drive 2 is of type 2 (AT1050) and drive 3 is of type 1 (AT810). Previously I was entering ‘1 2 3’ thinking these were the drive numbers rather than the drive types. Last picture shows a disk initialized (formatted) for full DSDD and with DOSXE written to it and with ‘323 K BYTES FREE’! Yeah! I’m not sure why it still says my 1050 is an 810 but I will figure that out too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sup8pdct Posted July 25, 2020 Share Posted July 25, 2020 DosXE has restricted number of drive types. Single will always come up with AT810 regardless if it is an 810 or 1050. AT1050 is for enhanced density only. DosXE Also saves the current drives you configured on your system as part of writing dos to disk. Change the drives around, dosXE cannot automatically configure itself to reflect the changes, you need to do it manually and write dos out to disk again. If you have drive that dosXE doesn't have a type for, eg 720K 3.5" XF551, you will need to delve into dos itself on the disk, find the drive type tables and edit a blank drive type with a sector editor once you figure out what the drive type bytes mean. Or use my DOSXE format program to set it up, format disk them write the dos out to save that particular drive type out. Forget about large drive sizes beyond a certain limit. Program is in that thread. James 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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