Re: MFM drive gone nuts

>As long as the controller board on the actual drive is from the same model 
>you can swap it.

Sure, the original point was with separate boards that you were forced to 
replace controller boards with the same one or you wouldn't be able to 
access the existing contents & to use the drive you'd have to low level 
format it and start again. My point about IDE is you have the same problem, 
except you can't always just low level format it and start again because the 
controller firmware is on the drive.

>The only problems where with the early PC's where you could only select 
>from a select amount of definitions (and couldn't enter your own to suit 
>the drive, or autodetect), but that's a seperate issue entirely. If a drive 
>worked with one of those systems but the logic board on the drive died, you 
>could certainly replace the logic board from another drive and you could 
>retrieve the data.

That isn't MikeS's experience and I'm pretty sure I've seen it happen to. 
The last MFM controller I looked at documentation for stored the drive 
geometry on track 0 during low level format, which I'm pretty sure is 
controller specific. Even if the data tracks are stored in a compatible way 
(which isn't a high chance) then I believe track 0 is going to cause you 
issues.


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