What exactly
does the "drive excerciser" do which comes in handy? -- I've
got some diagnostics and drive test tools built into ImageDisk which I find
very useful, and I'd be happy to add any other such functions that folks
need (provided of course that it can be done with the PC hardware).
It's been ages since I used it, probably last in about the 1990-2 timeframe,
but the main thing is to be able to read out the drive's speed in RPM (I
guess they use the index pulse for that?) and to be able to step the drive to
specific tracks, which is where the alignment disk comes in to the picture.
ImageDisk can do all of this and more ... You can't read the index pulse directly
on the PC controller, however I can time the occurance of a particular sector
ID passing under the head which gives me the ability to test the speed.
You can also step the drive to any track, analyze tracks, read tracks, format
tracks, write tracks and see the results of a continuous read-id loop all under
full manual control, and with a real-time display of the Fault, Ready, Double-
sided, Write-protect and Track-0 indications from the drive as well as the
sector-IDs passing under the head.
You can even write the buffered results of the last single-track read out to a
.IMD file so that when you manage to bludgeon the drive into reading that
!$#%@^ track thats been eluding you all night you can save it and merge it
into the rest of the disk image with IMDU.
I was just curious if there were any other functions built into the specialized
drive tester that I have not yet covered... Never owned/used such a piece of
equipment myself...
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
