baffling 800k floppy drive question

[mloret]

Hello folks!

I have a baffling issue with an 800k internal floppy drive that I am working on.

I serviced this drive, cleaned it, relubed per @LaPorta 's video and swapped out a bad eject motor. The only issue was that it wouldn't read a disk. After some testing I determned that it was an alignment issue. I went through this procedure to realign the ZTS and I got it so that it will read disks that are ProDos formatted for my Apple IIGS but I can't seem to get it to read disks formatted for Mac. I have tried and tried and still nothing. It will read my Apple II disks but not my known good Mac floppies. I bet this is something stupid that I am overlooking. Does anyone have a suggestion?

 

[Skate323k137]

I'm not sure if this will help but when formatting on a IIgs you should have interleave options. 4:1 is easier for a drive than 2:1 and I don't know if mac formats default to the latter. Floppy heads don't read continously they skip sectors, so the tighter the interleave of the format the better your calibration probably needs to be.

I would see if I could format the same FS that works on 2 different floppies with the different interleave settings on the IIgs (using a different drive) and then see if they act any different in the drive in question.

 

[mloret]

Thank you for the response. I'll give that a shot.

I also wanted to ask you about some music software. I got a Passport MIDI interface that's compatible with both Macs and Apple II's. I am currently trying to get it to work on my iigs with an old Casio MT-240 MIDI keyboard. I finally got it to work in SynthLab. However, I can't seem to get it to record or playback sound in Master Tracks Pro 1.04b. Not sure what I am doing wrong but I've tried everything. Could I shoot a vid and you tell me what I'm doing wrong?

 

[mloret]

I'm not sure if this will help but when formatting on a IIgs you should have interleave options. 4:1 is easier for a drive than 2:1 and I don't know if mac formats default to the latter. Floppy heads don't read continously they skip sectors, so the tighter the interleave of the format the better your calibration probably needs to be.

I would see if I could format the same FS that works on 2 different floppies with the different interleave settings on the IIgs (using a different drive) and then see if they act any different in the drive in question.

I tried everything I could think of and I still couldn't get that floppy drive to read HFS formatted disks. I formatted ProDOS 2:1 and 4:1 and it read those fine, but the minute I switched to HFS 2:1 and 4:1 it rejected them both. Then I tried initializing the disk in the bad drive for HFS and of course that worked in the bad drive but when I tried in the known good drive attached to my IIGS, it couldn't read it. That suggests to me that the issue continues to be with alignment but man, I just can't seem to get it right.

I spent several hours last night trying to get Master Tracks Pro to work on my IIGS. I actually switched to Master Tracks Junior in the hope that maybe it was a software issue. MTJr reliably would output to my keyboard but not record from it so I deduced that there was an issue with the computer receiving the input from the keyboard. I actually managed to get it to record a little at random. I paid close attention to what I did and how I did it and I couldn't find any consistency. Sometimes it would record and sometimes it wouldn't. Very weird. Because of this inconsistency, I suspected that it WASN'T something I was doing wrong but rather some sort of software issue like conflicting NDAs or something on my IIGS. I tried booting directly from the MTJr. disk to bypass all the different NDA's that load from my MicroDrive Turbo image. That seemed to work a little better but still not great. It would USUALLY record. Then I connected the Passport interface to my Mac LCII, launched a copy of EZ Vision from one of the images you shared with me and boom, it worked no problem. So much for the IIGS.