16 Dec
2017
16 Dec
'17
5:59 p.m.
On 12/16/2017 05:21 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
So, some of us do not trust the labels on disks.
Ha. I lost a bit of hair when I received a batch of 8" hard-sector
disks and tried to make sense of them. What were obviously sector
headers didn't line up at all with any of the sector holes.
It wasn't until I got to the bottom of the pile that I noticed that one
was a soft-sectored disk.
To make a long story short, it's possible to set some drives for
hard-sectored operation, with sector pulses output to a different pin
than index pulses. If one simply ignores the separate sector output,
one can use either soft- or hard-sectored floppies in soft-sector mode.
I did verify that this is exactly what the customer had done.
--Chuck