Charles_Ordania_Hughes@cup.portal.com (09/05/88)
I am not including any of the previous messages but I will summarize the one I am refering to. There was a question about why the XF551 would not boot up immediately from a double sided boot disk. This problem also occurs on single sided double density disks. The reason for the problem is because Atari wrote the OS (yep, that means operating system) for the drive and told it that everytime it powers on it should pretend that it is an 810. When you power on your computer and it attempts to boot, it thinks it is looking at a single density disk. The computer then recieves an error when it tries to read the disk. This error always occurs with Spartados, I haven't tested it with a different dos but I suspect it would happen then also. As soon as the drive encounters the error, it reconfigures itself to the correct density. Then when you hit RESET or turn your computer off and then back on again, the drive is properly configured. If the problem only occurs with Spartados then perhaps ICD will correct it by forcing the boot program to configure the drive correctly. If the problem is with the drive not doing an autoconfigure than all DOS's will have to be modified to boot correctly.