<PHB100@psuvm.psu.edu> (04/25/91)
Greetings and Salutations.
I have a weird problem w/ compatibility between my ST floppies and the
PS/2 mod 50 at work (DOS 4.00).
Floppies formatted on my ST show as empty at work ("file not found"). I
then formatted some floppies at work, took them home and copied some
files onto them from ST floppies. When I brought it back to work I got
the "sector not found" error. I took it across the hall to an AT machine
and got the same error on the external DS drive. When I tried a
directory on the external HD drive, I got a garbage directory. On
another Mod 50 I got the "sector not found." On a Mod 80 (running OS/2
1.3) the directory came up perfectly. I had to copy the files
individually onto the hard drive of that machine, reformat the disks, and
copy them back.
What's going on? I USED to be able to read floppies formatted on my ST
at work. And why when I just copy files onto the disks does it mess up
the directory?
Is are my floppy drives going bad? (this is the only explanation I can
think of...)???
Thanx in advance.
-------
In the dark no one can hear the color of your eyes.
Disclaimer: This is me. Do I sound like anyone else?
Paul Baughman PHB100@psuvm.bitnetytsuji@wucc.waseda.ac.jp (Y.Tsuji) (04/26/91)
If formatted by ST's destop formatting program or by similar ones (difference being user interface and fancy sectors/cylinder or greater than 80 cylinders), the diskettes are unlikely read well by other machines. Apart from the fact that the low level formatting is neither IBM nor ISO compatible, the media descriptor byte in the boot sector may not be correct. And many msdos machines I have used so far don't bother other info on that sector. And of course the first 3 bytes must be 'jump ...' in 8086 machine language and not 'bra ...' in 68000. The physical drive is very unlikely to be defective these days, but the interface can be very bad (genuine ATARI and IBM things may be OK.)
Bob_BobR_Retelle@cup.portal.com (04/27/91)
Paul Baughman asked about a sudden disk incompatibility between his ST and IBM PC systems. I'd recommend checking the disks with a Virus Killer, such as VKILLER immediately... a virus on the ST will overwrite the boot sector of a disk, wiping out the media descriptors that MS-DOS looks for. The disk will still show a directory on the ST, but will either display an empty directory on the IBM, or not be readable at all. It's possible that OS/2 (on the one IBM system that could read the ST disk) may not look for the same information in the boot sectors as MS-DOS does. There shouldn't be any worry of the virus spreading to the IBM system, but every ST disk in your library may have to be checked and disinfected. (I went through a baffling afternoon tracking down just this same situation not long ago..!) BobR
sslee@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Steven Lee) (04/28/91)
I've got tons of disks formatted at 80 tracks, 10 sectors/track (double-sided) for 800K in twisted format. I now want some of these disks to be MSDOS compatible. I used the program Diamond Format which is capable of writing a MSDOS boot sector without reformatting my disks, however MSDOS only recognizes the first 360K on the disk. I presume it writes some type of info on the boot sector to indicate the number of tracks and sectors it was formatted in. Could someone tell me where it is so I could use a disk editor to manuall change it? Steven Lee