Floppy stepping problem

Hi I've been writng some code to transfer disk images to my Olivetti M20. It uses 340K but with the first track being FM while the rest is MFM. I've found a good controller to handle the FM but I'm still having a stepper problems. When I transfer, using the hard drive as the source, things work fine. When I try to transfer from the 1.44M drive, I have to do a lot of Recal's on the 360K drive I'm using. I use DOS to fetch the image from the 1.44M. When I do this, the stepper on the 360k drive can't keep up and it corrupts the position. This requires a Recal to resort the stepper. Even a Read ID doesn't work because it is left partially stepped. How does DOS keep the mixed drives happy? They don't seem to be doing a lot of Recal's when transfering files. I've tried a number of things but I've not found any simple answer. Dwight