Subject: Re: 8-inch disk drives

From: "Jo Cooley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 22 18:38:09 2003

Thanks everyone for your very helpful suggestions. 

We had originally planned to do the transfer via serial cable but someone
suggested the hardware solution, which sounded interesting, but obviously
would require more work.

We are looking into the kermit solution.  If that fails then we will be
looking at logging data displayed on the monitor.

Jo

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From: "Steve Thatcher" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jul 24 07:05:00 2003

actually, a point of history is that the 320K disks were still
formatted for nine sectors. IBM, for some reason known only to
them, filled the ninth sector with all "IBM" if I remember correctly.
It has been 21 years since I did this, but I remembered wondering
why in the heck they didn't bother to use the ninth sector they
formatted. Maybe they were holding it close to them so they could
release an "enhancement" that boosted the capacity to 360K.

best regards, Steve Thatcher

>
>I am wonderign how on earth you can make a disk controller (note,
not the 
>OS driver software, the physocal controller) that works correctly
with a 
>9-sector-per-track format, but fails with the 8 sector-per-track
version, 
>all other parameters being the same. Because that's the only
difference 
>between the 320K and 360K MS-DOS formats.