Author: Jan Thomas (213.208.70.155)
Date: 09-25-2001 12:09
I think someone has mentioned it before though, black tape is only relevant if the disk sensors inside the drive are optical. Most FD's come with tiny pin switches, so rather than use tape, what I did was rip off a corner of floppy label and fold it up, then push it into the hole. THEN put some tape over it to make sure it dont fall out into your FD.
The problem with reading atari disks in the PC is not with the drives obviously, but rather with the BIOS of the mobo, which most operating systems use to do disk/screen i/o. This is why DOS cant read standard atari disks - the format is basically the same, but someone was right when they mentioned the difference is on the boot sector. The basic format of the disk is stored there, and that tells the BIOS what the geometry of the disk is. DOS just says to the BIOS "get me the data at X" and the BIOS does the rest.
Because of this, Dos (until lately) doesnt understand anything other than 9 or 18 sectors per track (DD 720 & HD 1440K) and tracks 0-79, and 1 or 2 sides. Quite a lot of atari disks came formatted to 10 sectors a track to give 800k per disk, (esp menu and game disks) and sometimes used upto track 82-83, though I have never seen a 3 sided disk! :-)
Anyway the utility that was mentioned, I think it is this one: http://crawlycrypt.chromagic.net/CCC2/UTILITY/DISK/CONVERT.ZIP to put an IBM format bootsector on the disk. OBVIOUSLY - DONT USE IT ON DISKS THAT HAVE CODE IN THE BOOTSECTOR!
Also, visit the little green desktop, http://lgd.fatal-design.com/ I think they have all the utilites there to read/write atari disks into files and vice versa.
Hope this helps.
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