Connect a PCW 3" Disk Drive to a PC

Started by P5ychoFox, 19:32, 06 March 20

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P5ychoFox

Thanks Geoff. All the .dsk images I created seem to be around 95Kb (should be 180k).

I'll take another look at my PC BIOS settings regarding boot up floppy seek to see if that's causing the problem.

Once the .dsk image was created I saved onto a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy. I then put this in a USB floppy drive and from there onto my Windows 8 laptop running CP/M Box. Could this have caused problems? I didn't think moving the .dsk file around using such methods would affect the file as it had already been created. I may be wrong though.

robcfg

It looks suspiciously half of the required size, so maybe removing the double step may help.


Can you make an image of a regular CP/M disk that we have a good image for? That way we could compare the data on the dsk and figure out if double-stepping is the root cause for the problem.


I think that definitely it is the double step, try removing it first.

P5ychoFox

That's it! The step needs to be 1 for a 180k drive. I've just made .dsk copies of CP/M, Time & Magik and a RAM Test program and all run perfectly in CP/M Box emulator. Many thanks for all the assistance; I have been wanting to create .dsk images from 3" disks for about 10 years so it's so great to have finally succeeded  :D

robcfg

Glad you managed to do it!


Cheers,
Rob

geebus

Fantastic to see this knowledge. I might need to delve in here at some point in the future for making my own system with a 3" drive.
Well done!
Can you use this to make .dsk to physical 3" disks too? I'd like to be able to do this for programs that i have written on an emulator to then use on a real machine (CPC or PCW).

GeoffB17

I assume that you mean that you want to write a .dsk image onto a real 3" disk in a real 3" drive, so that you can then use the 3" disk in a real CPC or PCW?

Yes, assuming you've got PC prog to write the data from the .dsk onto the floppy.   Not sure which prog you need, but I thing one of John Elliott's progs, DSKWRITE, is a hybrid prog that will work on both a CP/M machine and on a PC, but I think it will do standard CPC .dsk images only, and not the extended variety.   I don't know what will do the job running on a PC with extended format images.  Maybe there are options in the SAMdisk system?

Geoff

geebus

Currently I use cpcdiskxp to write my .dsk files onto 3.5" floppies for my external drive on the 6128.
However, If I can add a 3" drive to a computer so that I can write 3" disks too, that would be fantastic.


Just need to work out a way of getting some new 3" disks made..

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