5.25 floppy disks: unable to format — ZXNet «hardware.zx»

From Alexander Kozhemyachenko To All 3 May 2006

Hello, All Once they gave me about a hundred 5.25" Centech floppy disks (beautiful, multi-colored) under my Spectrum needs. I rushed to format them, and it turned out that the tracks were 0 to 43 are formatted with a bang, but starting from 44 nothing is formatted (tried FUT and DCU). When connecting the drive to a PC, these floppy disks are perfectly formatted to 1.2M, and when trying to format under TR-DOS on a PC, it fails again at 44 track. What is the reason and is there a way to overcome this? (I still put these floppy disks into use, using 1392 sectors in them, which formatted)

From Konstantin Zhukov To All 3 May 2006

Hello Zhizh There is a possibility that the drive controller does not enable dual density records.

From ASDT To All 4 May 2006

Hello Zhizh "about a hundred 5.25" floppy disks "Cool :)

From Victor Ronin To All 4 May 2006

Hello, Jukov Juk> There is a possibility that the double drive is not enabled in the drive controller Juk> recording density. or it was never there :) but it’s not his fault, it’s the enemy’s HD disks :)

From Grand To All 5 May 2006

Hello Ronin I would like more information: full floppy markings and full name disk drive, as well as the computer...

From Konstantin Sviridov To All 5 May 2006

Hello Zhizh Most likely there is damage in the write pre-compensation unit: DD85-86, DD96-97. If you don’t have an oscilloscope, you can check the circuit by disconnecting pins 2, 4 of the DD97 from pin 29 DD90 (TR43) and connecting them to . In this case, formatting after track 43 must continue.

From Vitaly Kovalev To All 5 May 2006

Hello Zhizh Zhi> Unformatted floppy disks are called Centech HD5196D So the disks are HD, you need to use DD......

From Victor Ronin To All 5 May 2006

Hello Zhizh Zhi> i.e. It's still a matter of floppy disks, but why Exactly, HD disks require a higher write current. 5313 and fd-55 most likely regular DDs won't burn these discs either. Chinon - if he was born as 1.2mb then maybe be after switching to DD mode (for Spectrum) it still has high currents records (as for HD) - if they also switched to DD mode - then There is a picture of unformatted disks. Usually I just like HD discs I send it away (here is a stack). but maybe soon I’ll start looking askance at them too :)

From Alexey Fufaev To All 22 August 2006

Hello Ronin I was using my lensec7 program when I was given 300 floppy disks DSDD formatted not into standard 2544 but into 2633 sectors. Moreover, the boot wrote to the zero track (its unused part).

From Alexander Medvedev To All 25 August 2006

Hello, dj--alex dja> Moreover, the boot wrote to the zero track (its unused part). There is no need to do this. In fact, the sectors on track 0 are used for directory system DirSys 1.00, and should not be damaged by any bootloaders.