Drive A: not responding woo's

[exxos]

I can load FCOPYIII and format a floppy 1.44MB just fine. Though if I try to create a AUTO folder on desktop, it always comes up "drive A: not responding" .. I mean WTF, it formats the whole disk just fine.. its TOS104.. never seen this issue before ?!

Drive is known working (tried 2) , tried 3 1772's... its got a AJAX in there now... DMA & 1772 mods done... don't get it...

oddly it does actually seem to create the folder...

[zack4mac]

I don't know but having a guess bad connection between drive and controller? could you have enough current to realise only a part of the controller or is the drive some fancy thing that needs something extra to acknowledge the floppy? I have had IDE hard drive act strange intermittently because of a bad connection or faulty power supply? I feel a bit cheeky advising someone who develops and designed his own electronics. I'm sure you have figured it out by now.

[exxos]

I've gone as far to resolder half the board so far. It was acting up crashing, screen going off etc when I pressed around the MFP area.. thats fixed now at least..

I think its a OS issue... I think my kit which switches 8/16mhz may work, but running the 1772 at 16mhz all the time doesn't... have to pop out for a couple hours, so will try one of my 144 kits in it when I get back...

[stephen_usher]

I seen to remember the way Atari did it on the TT was to switch frequencies only when accessing HD floppies. I could well be mis-remembering though.

[exxos]

No idea, I half recall Troed having issues with a 1772 as it was running at 16MHz constantly. I think it would start failing after a couple of hours or something..

In any case, the kits I do only switch into 16MHz when HD is accessed. The test I do formats of floppy several times so I verify them as 16 MHz capable, but I recently changed this in my store to burst modes at 16 MHz, as I cannot guarantee they will function at 16 MHz constantly all day. I think some kits switched into 16 MHz and stopped there which is why they would not function very well, but my kit always switches back to 8 MHz so it does not stress the 1772. So now I am home, I will add this kit back in to see what happens..

What I actually did was run the 1772 directly from the 16 MHz from the shifter so it only works with HD floppies.. It will load FCOPYII and format a floppy just fine, but if I try and even just create a folder on desktop, it comes up drive A: is not responding, so I think this is a OS fault....

But even so, I would not have expected only running the 1772 at 16 MHz to have caused this problem. But it could be one of those things which is a conflict with the DMA which I documented somewhere else, so it could be databus corruption as well.

What we really need is Icky to try this out on his board where he applied the DMA and 1772 patches

[exxos]

Kit installed and now working.. So there is definitely something odd going on just need more investigating at some point, though it is not really anything terribly important to worry about..

EDIT:

Oh no, I just realised about the step rate would not work at 16MHz..

[exxos]

Rather than open up a separate post.. I'll just dump this here as to what I am working on today...

What I did before was solder the ZIF socket straight into the motherboard as it actually fitted.. This machine is to be used for testing all the 1772 chips I bulk purchased last week. I want to test them at 16 MHz before adding them to my store so I needed a test machine, so I thought I would just wire 16 MHz signal straight to the chip, but of course I was half asleep while doing this last night and totally forgot that this would not work.

So now I have hacked the ZIF socket onto a new HD floppy module, and I will hack the firmware so it runs the thing at 16MHz all the time. Only this time the step rate and seek rate will be adjusted so it should work fine...And the machine can just be left for 10 minutes and then a high-density floppy formatted a couple of times to verify that there is no issues..

How I was testing this before, was formatting the floppy several times one after the other to make sure the chip ran stable at 16 MHz.. But this of course takes a phenomenal amount of time.. So running the chip that constant 16 MHz means the test is more stubborn and I only have to format the floppy twice..

The girlfriend will be having this test machine to test out around 300 of these chips, so I also have to make this machine cat proof as well which may take a while

IMG_3973.JPG (82.91 KiB) Viewed 2893 times