Disk images from real TI floppy disks? Possible?

[aftyde]

Hi All,

 

Have been debugging floppy weirdness for months. Are there any tools out there that will look at a real floppy and tell the format type, interleave, skew, GAP3 length, format value and other details? I have picked through details on diskette formats and can't seem to find one place that adequately documents the format. I'm hoping I can take an actual known good floppy, and create a known good image that will read, write and init on my system.

 

For some strange reason, I can't init a disk. Can read and write to it no problem. Passes all non-destructive tests. However a init always formats and kicks back an error 16 when verifying.

 

Have tried swapping controllers, cables, PEB. console, moving cards around, cleaning edge connectors... have not yet found a virgin but that may be next.

 

Cheers, Arthur...

Edited October 30, 2016 by aftyde

[Sinphaltimus]

I know this doesn't answer your question but maybe something I'm doing will help you get it to work properly?

 

You say disk images. Are you using a real floppy or an emulated one?

Also, When I wen through this similar thing, I ran into multiple issues that all came down to proper cabling, proper termination, proper DSKx setting and the physical location of each drive. Once I knew I had all the drives correct, it came down to the foppies I was using and the settings I had to choose that would work because I can't get the exact correct floppy I need. So I'm using 5 1/5" DSDD disks but I can only format them as DSSD. I have a 3.5" drive but I'm using DSHD diskettes initializing again as DSSD. Then I have a GoTek drive that I cannot initialized with. Read and write find but I have to create blank initialized floppy images on the PC using TIMT (TI IMage Tool).

My current setup is this:

My Disk Controller is a PHP1240 modded.

DSK1 = 80 track = GoTek Internal, first drive on the internal cable, gotek jumper set to disk1 (can only set as disk1 or two). No termination.

DSK2 = 80 track = 3.5" floppy, does not have jumpers to set, installed at the end of the internal cable does not have termination. (drive type doesn't need it I understand)

DSK3 = 40 track = 5.25" floppy on external cable with jumpers set to DSK3 and termination installed.

[+Ksarul]

You have several options for creating disk images that you can then move over to the TI: TI99-PC from Paolo Bagnaresi will work fine to transfer files and disks back and forth--and can format disks if the controller in the PC supports it. I say this to cover people needing SD disks, as all of the PC controllers support DD.

 

You can also use some PC hardware called the Cryoflux or the SuperCard Pro. There is a thord product of this type out there called the DiscFerret, but that project seems to be a bit moribund. The code and the board layout for that one are available online, however. Any of these devices will read a disk (for our purposes 5.25 or 3.5), make a true image of it, and write that image back to a blank disk. The disadvantage is that they all cost about $100 each, and you still need to get cables and a floppy drive to connect to them.