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From: coop@image.rochester.edu (Optics Group co-op student)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: 1.2 Meg Floppy and the Amiga
Message-ID: <876@ur-cc.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 89 00:59:03 GMT
Sender: news@uhura.cc.rochester.edu
Reply-To: coop@image.rochester.edu (Optics Group co-op student)
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Organization: University of Rochester, New York
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I have interfaced a 1.2Meg 5.25 floppy disk to my amiga 500.
The problem I am having is that I can't format beyound 40 (0-39) tracks.

When I mount the drive with 96 (0-95) tracks and try to format it, all
the programs I use stop at track 40 and return an error. If I mount
the drive as 40 track drive it works fine. Only the first 40 tracks
on the disk are used.

I have concluded that the problem must be in the trackdisk.device
driver.  All the manuals I could get my hands on indicate that the
trackdisk.device driver is hardcoded for a maximum of 80 tracks for 3.5"
drives and 40 tracks for 5.25" drives.

What I need to know is ??
1) Is it possible to alter the current driver's maximum track in some
not too clugy (sp) way.

2) Can there be two trackdisk.device drivers in the system? Of course
they would have different names but they would be manipulating the
same disk control registers.

3) If it is possible to have more than one trackdisk driver I would
appreciate some help writing the new driver. I have looked at several
example drivers, but none of them would be easy to modify to be a
floppy controller.

4) Any info on the AMIGA floppy hardware would be great.  What I need
to know is it possible to increase the number of sectors per track.
On an IBM AT I think the 1.2 Meg floppy is formatted with 15 sectors
per track. This would mean that 15K per track vs 10K with 11 sectors.
Thats 1.5 MByte per disk.

5) Why doesn't the Fast File System work with floppies? The format
works fine but files are always corrupt and there are no error
messages.

Any info would help.

My name is Ray Stewart and  I can be reached at HOME (716)334-2305
						WORK (716)275-4425