Scor­pio News

So next I thought I’d try using the ASSIGN command from DOS, guessing that the BIOS always picks up the drive parameters from drive A from the ROM BIOS and forces it to do the double speed bit if the drive is 80 track. I set up the paremeters for drive E and then assign drive A to drive E. I got 80 steps alright, but still 15 sectors/​track. Disgusting!!

Then I took the 40 track drive out and shoved one of the 80 track Teac drives out of my Gemini in the hole, all should work now – or so I thought. I set up the parameters to set drive B to 80 track and told it go. Can you imagine my amazement when the 80 track drive proceeded to double step, do 40 tracks, spend the next 40 steps banging away at the end stop and then have the nerve to tell me the disk had 720K.

At that point I assume I had got the select links on the Teac mixed up, but for the life of me I can’t see what I had got wrong as it still worked as an 80 track drive when it found its way back into the Gemini. Seeing it was about 3.30 in the morning I left it, and haven’t come beck to it yet. But then again, someone cut there has probably achieved my aim of using the 1.2 Mbyte drive on an AT as a different logical 80 track 720K drive, sitting there assuming that everyone knowe the trick, so perhaps if they would like to drop me a line ......

Next Time

Well I guess that about wraps it up for this time round. Next time I’ll chat about the fairly painless conversion from dBASE II to dBASE III Plus, some of the not so nice surprises it has in store, and how to go about compiling it using Clipper, Quicksilver or Foxbase, none of which is entirely compatible with each other.