1050 US Duplicator identification needed

[Gunstar]

I'm selling this drive on E-bay and am bumping this topic up so people with questions from E-bay can see the pictures and the links given to me from people while researching this Duplicator upgrade.

[+kheller2]

Sorry for not being clear. The behavior depends on the other firmware's drive, not in the Duplicator's firmware version. It is possible that the issue was fixed in some version, but I think I checked the last one and I didn't see the fix.

 

The problem is how the first track is formatted, more precisely the 3 first sectors. As you may know, the 3 first sectors of a DD disks are treated as if they were in SD. The sectors on a DD disks have 256 bytes instead of 128. But the 3 first sectors are transferred as 128 bytes. This is to allow booting from a computer OS that is expecting a SS disk.

 

The standard is to format all tracks identically, even the first one. That is, those 3 sectors are still formatted as 256 bytes. Only that when they are transferred to the computer in either direction, the transfer is for the first 128 bytes only.

 

But the Duplicator formats the first track in a different way. The 3 first sectors are physically formatted with 128 bytes. This will break other drives when trying to detect the density of the disk. Because density detection depends on the sector size to distinguish between enhanced and double density.

 

In the case of the USD, it will work correctly when the density detection reads a sector number higher than 3 (4-18); because those sectors are always 256 bytes. It will break the density detection if it happens to read one of the first 3 sectors. In the latter case the USD will "think" the disk is in medium/enhanced density.

 

 

Very old topic here (but feels like it was just yesterday..) I was wondering if it was possible to modify the firmware to allow "proper" formatting of the first three sectors on a Duplicator. This does explain why I thought my USD drive was flakey because a lot of the time my Duplicator disks would not work properly in that drive. I assumed my USD drive was off somehow and the Duplicator was the proper working one and I just couldn't live w/o track buffering after experiencing it.

Edited June 9, 2016 by kheller2

[ijor]

I was wondering if it was possible to modify the firmware to allow "proper" formatting of the first three sectors on a Duplicator.

 

Probably is just a small patch. Note that if you still have your USD, or any other DD drive, you can format the disks in the other DD drive. The Duplicator will happily read DD disks formatted in other drives. The incompatibility is only the other way around.