[sebhc] Soft/hard sector disks

[Dan Lanciani]

|"Steven Parker" <sp11 at hotmail.com> wrote:
|
|Lee Wrote:
|>It was the reverse of this. The published circuit allowed you to use
|>physically hard-sectored disks (with 11 holes) with the soft-sector
|>controller (which expected 1-hole disks). The idea was that you had
|>100's of hard-sector disks when you bought your new soft-sector
|>controller, and could re-use these disks.
|
|I was just thinking .. perhaps with a special driver, you could read 
|soft-sector disks, in the soft-sector format, using the hard-sector 
|controller.

You might be able to read single density soft-sector disks this way, but
not of course double-density.

|Or is the low-level encoding not compatible?

The H17 controller is pretty dumb and you can more-or-less read an FM
track as a stream of bits, but you don't get the clocks.  Standard FM
formats use clocking violations as flags for synchronization.  So the
two questions would be (1) would the clocking violations upset the H17's
clock recovery and (2) can you decode the bit stream without benefit of
the flags?  (I guess there is really a third question: is there enough
preamble in the right place for the clock recovery to synchronize to
begin with?)

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl at danlan.*com
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