CFFA3000 IO Error writing & formatting

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CFFA3000 IO Error writing & formatting

Postby bradbdavis » Tue Jun 30, 2015 2:34 pm

I have an Apple IIe Platinum & the 1.0C CFFA3000. Everything seems to be working fine, except that the CFFA3000 doesn't seem to be able to write to .dsk or format a .dsk on the virtual disk II.

If I boot a real Dos3.3 disk, then format a real blank disk, it works fine. I can save games while playing games, etc.

However, as soon as I use the virtual disk II to try to boot to dos3.3 and format a .dsk, I get "IO error" (and what seems to be a partially formatted disk, missing the "hello" program, etc--init hello).

Another symptom is that while playing a game, games report errors while trying to save a game (again virtual game dsk, properly formatted blank virtual .dsk).

I noticed one or two others mentioned having this problem, but I never saw any followup, resolution, etc.

Does anyone have any information on this?
bradbdavis
 
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Re: CFFA3000 IO Error writing & formatting

Postby david__schmidt » Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:47 am

Take a look at your manual, page 14: "Special Note: Formatting of Virtual Floppy Disks." Here's a synopsis of what it says:

Some aspects of the CFFA3000 Disk II support make it such that “formatting” of disks may not be successful, depending on several factors:
  • Speed of the destination memory device
  • Operating system of the software doing the formatting
  • The formatting program itself
Several formatting scenarios have been tested with the CFFA3000, and the ones that have been shown to work well are:
  • DOS 3.3’s INIT command
  • Whole-disk copies as performed by COPYA (on the DOS 3.3 System Master diskette), which performs a format operation before copying
  • Whole-disk copies as performed by CopyII+, which performs a format operation before copying
  • Disk format operations performed by ADTPro
Formatting scenarios that are known to NOT work are:
  • Formatting performed by the ProDOS system utilities
  • Formatting performed by the Apple Pascal Operating System
In general, all of these issues may be worked around by simply using a disk image that has been created elsewhere with programs like CiderPress or AppleCommander.
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