The Sinclair QL Forum

I'm facing a strange problem I'm trying some old floppy (720K) with the trump card and the format gives 720 sector.
Also when I try to save although the floppy seems to work the file does not saved.
Any suggestion?

Mike

Hi,
Is it the drive your having problems with, or some particular disks.

If it's the disks, are they Double Side Double Density, or Single Side. I think you used to be able to buy SSDD 3.5" disks. If single sided you will only get 720 sectors

If it's the drives, Do the heads need cleaning, or there's something wrong with it, so that one side is not seen.

I don't know about files not saving. Can you see and load files OK on other known good disks. Is it a write protect issue? But I would have expected some error message in that case.

40 track double sided drive ? (9*40*2)

Try counting clunks during format

FLP_TRACK ?

I remember running into this many years ago with an old CST disk interface. I didn't get to the bottom of it, but tried various things with varying degrees of success.

1. When formatting, adding the "*D" or "*H" to the format name helped when the drive didn't identify the disk or drive tracks or the interface was capable of handling something other than DD. Obviously only worked on interfaces which supported something like FORMAT "flp1_ABCDE*D" to force it to format at double density.

2. the FLP_TRACK command sometimes helped (not always).

3. There was a tendency to 'trash' disks when this sort of thing happened. Something happened to either the interface or drive which caused the tracks not to be written out correctly. The only thing which seemed to help was (a) ejecting the disk, (b) inserting a known working disk of the correct density/tracks WITH WRITE PROTECT ON (I kept a blank known-working disk for that purpose). This seemed to get the drive and interface to reset and get their act together.

720 sectors means the disk has been formatted single-sided or single density (a 720k disk in a DS/DD drive should give you ~1440 sectors).
What does FORMAT say when it finished?

What is the type of disk you used? SS/DD or DS/DD?
Are you really sure your drive is DS/DD, thus 720k?


If you didn't hear any head collisions during the format, the number of tracks is probably correct, so no need to use the FLP_TRACK command.

Other than that, you can force single sided by using a "*" as the 11th character of the medium name when formatting. But that shouldn't be necessary - Your card seems to assume single sided already.

With a Trump Card, the only other thing you can "adjust" is the floppy motor run-up time with FLP_START <x>, there x is the number of 20ms ticks the controller should wait until it accesses the drive. Set that really high (like 50 or even 100) and see if it perhaps makes a difference.

Hi,

I used have this problem when using CST and Sandy expansion cards with Disk interfaces. But all these issues seemed to go away once I got a Trump Card. I then, used Miracle Systems hardware with no problems.