dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch) (09/15/89)
I just bought a floppy head cleaner kit (after a bad experience with some crappy disks), and have been trying to write a program to exercise the heads while the cleaning disk is in place. DOS and the BIOS don't seem to like the idea of it at all, so I'm programming the floppy disk controller directly, according to instructions from Robert Jourdain's book. Things are going well when I give my program a valid drive number to work on. My problem is that I can't determine whether the drive number is valid. The DOS/BIOS services try to read the disk, so that's no good; the equipment list always tells me I have 2 floppy drives, when in fact I have one; the "Sense Drive Status" command described in Jourdain doesn't seem to give any different answer whether I ask about the drive that's there or the one that's not. I suspect a misprint, because there are lots of others in this section of the book. On an AT, I think I could query the CMOS RAM, but that doesn't help here. Can anyone tell me how to make this simple determination? And after that, is it safe to assume that any XT clone will be using 40 track disks? Duncan Murdoch
mikek@col.hp.com (Mike Karin) (09/19/89)
If all you want is a program to exercise the heads while a cleaning disk
is in place, there is a program called Clean Drive available from
an outfit called Microsystems Development. The program steps the heads
across the full surface of the disk for user defined time period. The
program is released to the public domain.
They can be reached at:
Microsystems Development
4100 Moorpark Ave. #104
San Jose, CA 95117
Phone (408)296-4000
FAX (408)296-5877
Of course, if you REALLY want to write the program yourself, best of luck.
Mike Karin
Hewlett-Packard Company
Colorado Springs, Colorado