On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 10:55 PM, william degnan <billdegnan@gmail.com> wrote: > Bruce Faierson, the 2nd president of CBUG and owner of Northwest Music near > Chicago (CBM dealership) sent me this email about 10 years ago, if helpful. Interesting stuff. Thanks for passing that on. > He has since passed away unfortunately. I am sure he'd be glad to know > people are still working on these drives and interested in them. Sorry to hear that, but I would think he'd be glad to know. > The D9090 and D9060 are mostly the same They are entirely the same except which physical drive is installed (Tandon TM602S with 4 heads vs TM603S with 6 heads) and the position of one jumper. The firmware on the DOS board reads the jumper and uses that for all the head calculations. > http://www.vintagecomputer.net/commodore/IEEE_drives/D9090_testing.txt On the formatting - there are a couple versions of the ROMs. The low-level format is done differently (I do not know the details) but there is a substantial difference in formatting time, like 45 minutes vs 2.5 hrs. You just have to do a HEADER and walk away for a while and come back and look for blinking lights. It's _usually_ the drive mech that's bad if a format fails. Those are old drives. They are also uncommon models. Fortunately, one can sub a Seagate ST225 in a D9060 or a Seagate ST241 in a D9090 and they work (at the original 5MB or 7.5MB capacities at 4/6 heads and 153 tracks - the extra tracks are ignored - it's probably possible to bump the number of tracks up to 254 by altering the ROM code, but I don't recall if anyone has done that). -ethan Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2017-08-18 04:00:01
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