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Tips on formatting floppy disks

Tips on formatting floppy disks

General advice

Based on details from this discord thread:

ISSUE:

Upon using the HEADER"name" command to format a floppy disk, you may run into this error message:

27, read error,09,37

 

RESOLUTION:

  • DD disks are recommended over HD disks

  • If you want to use HD disks, follow the steps in the “Format procedure for HD disks” section below.

  • If using a non CBM disk, you need to use the low level format with HEADER, so add ,I42

    • I.e., HEADER "name",I42

NOTE: If using HD disk, you may initially have success formatting your disk without the use of the floppy tool, be then you may find other problems will surface later on during disk usage.

Format procedure for HD disks

  • Assure that HD hole on this disk is open

  • Run the Floppy tool on your MEGA65

  • Select option 6. Wipe disk

  • After disk is wiped, then cover the HD hole with some black gaffa tape (so that the drive will treat it as a DD disk)

    • NOTE: Place the tape on the underside of the floppy disk (not on the top side!)

  • Then back in BASIC, perform the HEADER "name",I42 command to format the disk for use on your MEGA65

KiDra’s Alternate approach

  1. Do not cover the hole of the HD Floppy, so that the drive operates in HD Mode and run "6. Wipe disk" in floppytest.prg

  2. Cover the hole to make the drive recognize the floppy as DD and run "3. Test formatting of DD disk"

  3. After formatting run "2. Test all sectors on DD disk" to confirm the disk is good.

 

Video walkthrough

This video walks through the topics covered here:

 

Gurce’s experiences of “waking up” a non-working floppy drive

I noticed something about the batch of disks I copied across my daughter's Spring game onto.

  • When I followed my workflow of using @gardners' floppytest tool and geehaf's disk copier tool to prepare them, they all seemed to work fine.

  • When I tried turning my MEGA65 on now, they wouldn't work, if I did a DIR, it'd give a "READ ERROR" in basic.

  • Oddly, I then ran gardners' floppytest tool again (option 2 to test all sectors of DD disk)

    • the disk seemed to be fine there

  • Resetting back to basic, then doing MOUNT and DIR, the disk now worked and showed the directory...

I wondered whether something about the floppytest tool "woke up" the disk drive in some way... So I tried this:

  • turned the mega65 off, then on again

  • did a MOUNT, then DIR, and it still worked... 😮

So not sure what to make of that. Did my floppy drive seem to have some initial trouble when not used for long durations, which was problematic for basic, but once floppytest tool made use of the drive, it gave it a good workout to bring it back in working order, even when used from basic, and on subsequent power cycles after?

Maybe one observation on the initial problem period, upon doing the DIR, I could hear just a light motor sound (of the disk spinning I guess), I did not hear any chug-chug sound of the read head moving up or down. Almost as if the read head had gone to sleep, and maybe floppytest tool woke it up somehow... 🙂

dddaaannn — 1:29 PM

You might want to suspect a ROM issue, not necessarily hardware or media. Earlier this year there seemed to be an uptick of reports of a misbehaved physical drive mount, but we never narrowed it down. If you can repro consistently, try again with an older ROM.