Geneve Floppy Formatting and File I/O devices

[+9640News]

I have been trying to setup a Geneve system with all available file I/O options one could imagine for testing purposes.  I wanted to report my results for other's that may be interested.

 

I have a HFDC with the 32K ram chip and the 9216B data separator required for High Density formatting.

 

I was able to successfully format a floppy at 1.44MB capacity and successfully copied files to it filling it up.  Just a FYI, the floppy only supports 3 subdirectories with no ability to create a sub-sub-directory.  Formatting was accomplished with the command:

 

FORMAT B: /2 /36 /80

 

Now, in the process of setting up a 5.25" floppy drive, I encountered various issues.  Turns out most of my 5.25" drives have issues.  One drive does not spin up, another drive spins-stops-spins and is not consistently on.

 

Another drive, I went to FORMAT A: /2 /18 /40 to format as 360K.  This drive would only format as SS/SD as 90K.  It would not give an error which really perplexed me.  Plugging a good working 5.25" 360K drive in, it formatted DS/DD at 360K as one would expect.  I would have expected that one drive where I attempted to format 360K to have given me an error, but it did not.  At this point, not sure what the oddity is.  I'm copying @InsaneMultitasker on this as maybe he may be aware of something.

 

And another FYI, my system has a CorComp floppy controller with 5.25" 360K floppy drive, HRD 4000B, Myarc HFDC with DREM configured with 2 x 64 MB drives and a 3.5" 1.44 MB drive, Myarc 512K converted to Geneve ram, Raspberry PI with a PI 4 w/ 1 TB SSD, Geneve 9640 w/ PFM, and a SCSI with a SCSI2SD configured with 6 x 256 MB drives.

 

All of this is being powered by a single power cable to the 838PEBox.  

 

Yeah, I know it is a bit extreme, but it does allow me to cover just about all options that may be thrown at me.

 

 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

On 10/12/2022 at 9:51 AM, 9640News said:

Another drive, I went to FORMAT A: /2 /18 /40 to format as 360K.  This drive would only format as SS/SD as 90K.  It would not give an error which really perplexed me.  Plugging a good working 5.25" 360K drive in, it formatted DS/DD at 360K as one would expect.  I would have expected that one drive where I attempted to format 360K to have given me an error, but it did not.  At this point, not sure what the oddity is.  I'm copying @InsaneMultitasker on this as maybe he may be aware of something.

I'm not fully understanding what happened.  You state you went to format A: as 360K but it would only format as SS/SD 90K.  How did you know this if there was no error?  Did you have to specific /1/9/40 or did the verify process knock the available sectors from 1440 to 358? 

[+9640News]

1 hour ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

I'm not fully understanding what happened.  You state you went to format A: as 360K but it would only format as SS/SD 90K.  How did you know this if there was no error?  Did you have to specific /1/9/40 or did the verify process knock the available sectors from 1440 to 358? 

I believe in a separate offline thread it turned out the issue appeared to be related to a speech card not fully seated.

 

But to your question, I attempted to format /2 /18 /40, but it was a quick format and formatted as /1 /9 /40 with a DIR confirming 360 sectors.  The verification did not report any errors.  I suspect somewhere in the format routine, and the speech card not fully seated, there must have been a memory "error" causing the issue.  That is just a guess though.