AT&T 3B2 floppy format

[Curious Marc]

* On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 11:41:01PM -0700, Curious Marc <curiousmarc3 at gmail.com> wrote:

 It looks like you did everything right. However I thought one
 specifies interleave directly in the BIN2IMD command using the DM=3
 option. I see you have DM=4 on your command line. But since you can
 load the kernel that might not be the source of your problem. Having
 a disk being formatted in one drive not readable in another could
 simply be that one of the two drives is misaligned. Or some silly
 difference with the track width between the two heads of your later
 HD drive and the earlier QD drive, although since they are both 80
 tracks that should not be. BTW, can you do the reverse, format a
 disk in your AT&T and recover every sector through IMD on your PC?
 In this case there might be an option in ImageDisk to write without
 formatting. I think you can do that with Omnidisk.  
 
 Marc


Hi Marc,

DM=3 in the BIN2IMD arguments list has nothing to do with
interleaving. It specifies Data Mode 3, 300kbps MFM.  But it turns
out, this WAS my problem!

After doing more experimentation this morning, I've discovered that
the data mode I should have been using was 250kbps MFM, NOT 300kbps!

After changing ImageDisk to write 250kbps (and ensuring that the
300RPM "I" jumper was strapped on the FD55-GV), the images work
perfectly!

So, that's the secret. 3B2 floppies are DSQD 250kbps MFM.

Whew!

-Seth

Oh, oops, I should have checked the doc rather than writing from memory. I am glad your problem is solved though! The floppy many drives, track density, rotation speeds, bit rates, modulation formats and sectoring are such a mess, congratulations on solving the riddle, that’s no small feat.
Marc