8" hard sectored floppies - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

3 Jun 2004

...
 From: "Fred Cisin"
&lt;cisin(a)xenosoft.com&gt;

  > >Hard and Soft sectored disks are never
compatible. On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
   Ah, never
say never, my friend! ;-)  I believe the ubiquituous NEC 765 (et al) does its
"index" on read by
 scanning for the 0th sector ID (which is 1 :-) The index hole is only
 needed for formatting, and that only for compatiblity. 
Unfortunately, the 765 does a "reset" of the chip whenever it sees the
index.  It can handle NOT having an index hole (AFTER formatting),
but excess holes will keep it from working. ---snip---

Hi Fred
 When I first got my first PC, I didn't have anything
but hard sectored disk that I'd used on my H89. I made
a foil disk that I put in with the disk to get around this
problem for formatting. It had a large hole that most
of the time only exposed one index hole. Placing it
in the drive was tricky but with access to the top of the
drive I made it work.
 Of course, I later bought a box of 360K disk but this
trick did get me started.
Dwight