TRS-80 Model II and KryoFlux (was Re: Todd Goodman has been refunded-)

On Aug 23, 2014, at 08:09 , William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote: Giggle... I think either word would be appropriate in this case! Ok, let me write something related to the list's charter to try to restore some of my tarnished karma: I got my new TRS-80 Model II up and running yesterday. Well, it was already running before I got it, but now it's less likely to emit smoke after I replaced the dreaded Rifa paper-dielectric EMI filtering capacitors in its power supply. I also learned that a Tandon TM848E 8" floppy drive appears to count track step pulses and refuse to step past track 76, rather than banging the heads against the stop at a track or two past that like my 5.25" drives do. This wouldn't be a problem, except that I'm trying to write boot disks with my KryoFlux, and its software tries to perform a spurious write to track 80. Since the drive won't step beyond track 76, that spurious write overwrites the last track of the disk rather than harmlessly falling into the extra mechanical slop track(s) that drives commonly have. The KryoFlux folks have been informed, and are looking into this. Finding that bug has been made possible by recent improvements in Keir Fraser's Disk-Utilities software, which have expanded the KryoFlux's utility into new and under-tested areas, so this issue is a growing pain brought about by positive progress. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/