jensen@cod.NOSC.MIL (Layne K. Jensen) (03/03/90)
I have finished (?) installing a 5.25-in floppy drive on my 1040ST, but have run into what to my untrained eye appears to be a catch-22 situation on boot-up. I haven't seen this discussed before, so I think there must be a simple explanation/fix. Just for the record, this is an Epson drive. If the floppy head isn't near track 0 at boot time, there is a vibrating sound from the drive, and it appears that the drive is trying to seek to track 0, but not succeeding, presumably because at that point the step rate hasn't yet been slowed down to 6 msec. Therefore the drive doesn't find track 0, the computer doesn't see the TRACK 0 signal asserted, and the computer comes to the conclusion that there is no drive B. Even though the program to set the seek rate is now executed from the AUTO directory, it doesn't matter, as the computer has given up. So I can't run a program that parks the heads on drive B. And on re-booting the whole problem repeats itself. What do you do about this situation? At this point my drive is in the open, so I manually reset the head before powering up the drive, but once it is in its case that won't be an option. Is there a program available to park the head before turning off the drive? (I know I'll forget to run it half the time.) How about a program to tell the computer that there really *is* a drive B after all, stuffing some information into a magic memory location? I don't have any documentation that would tell me about such locations. Do other types of drives manage to find track 0 even without the step rate change? Any help this would be appreciated. Layne Jensen jensen@nosc.MIL Naval Ocean Systems Center ...!sdcsvax!noscvax!jensen San Diego, CA -- Layne Jensen jensen@nosc.MIL Naval Ocean Systems Center ...!sdcsvax!noscvax!jensen San Diego, CA