Guys –
I’m working on a restoration project for VCF that requires imaging 8” disks (both SSSD and DSDD, mostly for the Tarbell controller) but I’m having trouble with it reading disks. So, I wanted to run through what I’ve done and see if I’m missing anything. It took me a while to hunt down a controller that would work with the PC/AT I have on the bench and that would pass all of the testfdc tests. The floppy drives are both 1.2MB drives. I located an Adaptec AHA-1522F. Testfdc passes. Next, I connected my 8” drive (a QumeTrak 242) to the controller using the 8” floppy interface adapter from DBit. On reboot, the BIOS seeks the drive no problem so I would say that the physical interface works. I tried formatting an 8” DSDD disk for MSDOS and I can’t get that to work (not sure why since the 8” drive should be similar to the 1.2MB). Rerunning the testfdc program fails all tests with the 8”, and it doesn’t successfully read any of the non-critical sample disks I have. Not sure this is enough for someone to go on, but I thought I’d throw it out there. As a separate question, what kind of disk imaging setups are people using for 8” disks? Thanks! Rich -- Rich Cini http://www.classiccmp.org/cini http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
