Any good low-level floppy disk software?

[Tashtari]

So I'm working on another TashProject, because of course I am.

To that end, I'm looking for some low-level floppy disk software for the Mac, something that will give me more than "this disk is unreadable". I know the Sony driver produces more useful error codes, and I'd like to find a tool of some kind that won't try to friendly them up for me.

Does any such thing exist?

 

[olePigeon]

I'm not aware of any software-only solutions for the Macintosh that let you control the floppy drive in such a manner. I had a conversation with someone who worked for Apple back in the day regarding diagnosing floppy drives and properly aligning them. He said the only way to control the drive and actually diagnose it required a special Sony laptop with a special harness and special software; none of which was leaked, unfortunately.

I'm no hardware/software person, but if the floppy drive is reporting these errors & the OS is just ignoring them, then it seems like there should be a way to have an interrupt that can forward those errors in some way.

Some software that can actually control the floppy drive would be neat. To manually move the head, turn the motors on/off, seek to a specific track, etc. Dunno if that's even possible.

 

[LaPorta]

The above was probably put into a dumpster in the 90s....what a bummer

 

[olePigeon]

I don't know if I heard it right, but it had a jig with a bunch of pins (probes) on it. You'd put the drive on it and hook it up to the special laptop. It could then probe the drive's individual components, as well as show the drive alignment and stuff.

 

[Tashtari]

there should be a way to have an interrupt that can forward those errors in some way

This would almost certainly be sufficient for my purposes. It'd work to throw everyday situations at the mac and just see where the floppy drive is coming off the rails. Something that took the last error code from the Sony driver and displayed it in the corner of the screen would be plenty. I don't know enough about Mac software to know where to begin with this, though. Do you have any suggestions?

 

[olePigeon]

I don't know, either, unfortunately. But hopefully one of the super smart guys on here will be able to help.

 

[Tashtari]

So I did a little reading of Inside Macintosh...

It looks like what I want to do is write a little application that does this:

• Poll "GetOSEvent" until a disk-inserted event occurs
• Try to execute a low-level sector read on the external drive
• Return and display the resulting error code

I wonder if I could do this in a HyperCard XFCN...