Support for Sinclair QL and Thor discs about greaseweazle HOT 6 OPEN

I'll have to consider all this, however I will note that "track0 absent after seek to cylinder 0" is often a drive-select issue. You will need to specify --drive=0 on the command line, for a straight ribbon cable and a drive which is jumpered for DS0.

The wiki probably needs an "imaging your first disk" page.

from greaseweazle.

Also, if you have existing images, flux or otherwise, that you would like to use to run gw tools through their paces, you can experiment with gw convert command for transcoding between formats, without even needing Greaseweazle hardware attached! It acts rather like gw read but imports from an image file rather than a physical disk.

from greaseweazle.

Yep I used --drive=0 on both my examples above. I think cable-swaps are an IBM-only thing, never seen them on my other micros (but then those tend to support 4 or 8 drives so there's some actual decoding going on).

Those ED drives work when plugged into 1772 based DD controllers - indeed I had to use them at a Crash show when my SAM Coupe prototype (SAM's use one VL1772 per drive) turned its nose up at my DD 3.5" MGT 'lifetime' (sic) drive but was happy to read 800K media with the ED/HD/DD pair I'd taken for my QL. I was careful not to write to DD from the ED drives!

So it's not --drive=0 but maybe some other line the ED drive exposes which upsets GW 4.1 but not WDC controllers (or the VLSI clones of those - I suspect they came bundled with MGT ASICs!). Any other ideas?

I understand about the raw stuff from years programming Paula and a little later dabbling with Jen's PCI/Zorro contraption. I started out with 35TSSSD, 87.5K formatted - a genuine SA400.

Early days for GW but thanks for your help and I hope I can fill in some gaps in the 80s micro media support from my PCW-columnist memories.

Time to get back to my KS2 Spectrum Next now.

from greaseweazle.

ED drives do have some special extra lines, but I think they are only for mode select and not particularly important to Greaseweazle. Or FlashFloppy for that matter, which works okay in PCs which support ED drives. I also have a (few) positive reports about ED support on Greaseweazle. The USB line rate at Full Speed is theoretically too slow but in practice the Greaseweazle v4 has enough RAM to buffer anyway (at least when using latest firmware v1.5). However you're not getting as far as actually trying to read a track...

The drive-head movement should be nothing special in an ED drive. I wonder if ED drives need more juice than can be supplied though a typical USB port when not in a power-delivery mode? Yeah, I'd start by providing external power to the drive. You could also try slowing down the step rate, but default is 10ms/step which I'm sure should be very much slow enough for an ED drive.

from greaseweazle.

My drives are all externally powered but it was worth asking. Pretty sure the step rate is 6ms or less, but ditto. I"ll try again at some point, cheers.

from greaseweazle.

I suppose another possibility is that those drives are jumpered DS1 and would respond as --drive=1. But if gw rpm --drive=0 is working, that seems less likely to be the problem. Perhaps this will remain a mystery for now!

from greaseweazle.