Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!att!ihlpm!njd From: njd@ihlpm.ATT.COM (DiMasi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit Subject: Re: Re: XF551 Message-ID: <2627@ihlpm.ATT.COM> Date: 28 Nov 88 19:43:46 GMT References: <11755@cup.portal.com> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois Lines: 31 > > To Frank Murphy: > > The XF-551 drive, in Double Sided mode, writes the information on the > back side of the disk in reverse. This means that if you flipped the disk > over, it could not read side 2 as side 1. It also means that a disk that ha > information on both sides would still have to be flipped over to work > properly. Sorry! This is somewhat misleading to anyone who has no understanding of double-sided disk drives. From the standpoint of "true" double-sided operations, the XF551 does NOT write the 2nd side in reverse; flipping a floppy writes it in "reverse." Flipping floppies has been the method used by 8-bit Atarians for using the 2nd side of a floppy, but it is only a standard (sort of) in the Atari world. (Unless "Commodorians" and/or "Applites" or other single-sided drive users do this too? I don't know about other 8-bit-computer disk drives.) If one has an XF551 drive, and wants the 2nd side of a floppy to be usable in other drives, then the solution is to flip the floppy as if the drive were a 1050, except that the floppy needs to be punched with a 2nd set (1 on each side of the jacket) of timing holes (I recall reading that the XF551 uses those timing holes when formatting floppies, just as the Percoms do. No, I never got into punching new holes in my floppies to use the 2nd side in my Percoms, but now that I know it will work.... maybe I'll try it, carefully!) Nick DiMasi njd@ihlpm.ATT.COM ...att!ihlpm!njd DELPHI: TURBONICK Uni'q Digital Technologies (Fox Valley Software subsidiary; ^ working as a contractor at AT&T Bell Labs in Naperville, IL) ( | this is an accent mark, supposed to replace the dot over the 'i')