28 Aug
2002
28 Aug
'02
5:43 p.m.
Thanks Tony. It ain't about to happen right away, but this goes in my
archives. Come to think about it my archives are full of your insight.
Maybe the time is right to issue a CD " The world According to Tony Aird-
computer hardware hints and help". Not necessarily kidding.
Lawrence
lgwalker(a)mts.net
bigwalk_ca(a)yahoo.com
I haven't worked on my M.2 for a long time (since I first got it about 3 or 4
yrs. ago, and I'm also missing the cables for the 3 HDs) It was
recommended by several people that I transfer the programs I have from 8" to 5
1/4 disks (unless bit-rot has already got to them) and I believe there's a faq
on how to do that. Do you know if the disk controller on the model 2 /16 is
the same as on the other RS models ? If so possibly I could just transfer them
to another format.
No, the M2/12/16 machines were desigend to use 8" drives. This would
imply a 500kbps data rate (double density MFM), and a 360rpm drive. The
5.25" drives used on the CoCo, M3, M4, etc use 250kbps data
rate (again double density MFM) and turn at 300 rpm.
You should be able to wire up a 1.2Mbyte PC 5.25" drive to the M2 though.
That's electrically very like an 8" drive. I am sure a web search will
turn up something about doing this.
A 1.44Mbyte 3.5" drive _might_ work. The data rate is right, but it turns
at 300rpm. This shouldn't matter too much (there's enough time between
index pulses for the machine to fit in all the data it expects to get in
there), apart from during formating (where the machine might object to
the excessively long gap between the end of the last sector and the next
index pulse). All you can do is try it -- it might work.
-tony