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Messing with External Disk Drives

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  Messing with External Disk Drives by Bill Degnan - 02/01/2007 22:56
Me? I am working on some old disk drives, basically taking each one and testing on a RadioShack Coco II with a 502 FD cart/adapter. I have about 10 external (self powered) DD 5 1/4" disk drives that I nurse along. They are used for TRS 80 Model 1's with the expansion interface and a DD controller, plus anything newer from RadioShack. It's good to pull them out and test every year to keep them limber. The reason I was using the Coco II and 502 FD cart is to take advantage of the enhanced basic command set disk commands.

The most prized drives of this group is a set of ancient Percom drives (drive 0 and 1). I am glad to report that I was able to revive the previously dead Percom drive 0 tonight. Ah simple pleasures.

Here are some commands that I used, if anyone is interested:

dskini0 (format a disk in drive 0)
copy "test.bas:0" to "test.bas:1" (copy a file from drive 0 to drive 1)

I have a lot of commands for ancient TRS 80 diskette / file controls on my web site, vintagecomputer.net. Use the search to locate.

Next - A Micropolis twin DD.



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