I would recommend testing the drives on a known good
system first.
Unless you know the drives are good, you can't trust the TESTFDC
results (A failure could be indicative of a bad drive, not a FDC
limitation).
What's "good enough" testing? As a minimum I'll boot DOS,
format a floppy with the drive and put DOS onto the floppy, then
boot the floppy. Is that enough or are there oddball quirks that
might be better exposed by something else?
If you don't use/trust the drives on a regular basis, then this is likely
the best you will be able to do - I would at least format, copy on a file
big enough to nearly fill the drive and then copy it back off and confirm
that all operations worked OK - this will be sure to check the inner tracks
which is where TESTFDC does it's thing.
Ideally, you would use known good/working drives. In my case, I have all
of the available drive types as externally attachable drives, and I use
them all frequently - knowing that I can trust the drives gives me confidence
in the TESTFDC results when I check out a new mainboard.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools:
www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
