Back in the 1980s floppy disks were expensive. And many early floppy disk drives were only single sided, which means they only had one read/write head and would only use one disk side. Both Commodore and Apple-II users quickly figured out that you could flip the disk around, if you punched a hole into the other side of the disk. This is a quick explanation on why this helped to double your disk capacity and some other differences between Commodore and IBM disk drives.
Tag: floppydisks
Commodore 4040 Disk Drive Repair
We have another Commodore IEEE-488 dual disk drive. It is the predecessor of the 8050 and it is almost compatible with the 1541, the C64’s disk drive. This specimen doesn’t work, its drives look quite mangled. So let’s fix it! But it is never that easy…
Spin Me Round: Commodore 1541 Repair
We have another dead 1541 floppy disk drive on the bench today. It is an infinitely spinning drive, so it means that somehow the drive is not booting. But what might be the cause…?
ZoomFloppy+OpenCBM+8050
The main issue with the Commodore 8050 and 8250 drives is: How do you get data onto them? The units use 100tpi floppy drives that are incompatible to the regular 48tpi and 96tpi disk drives used in the 1541 and in PC DD and HD drives. So there is no chance using those. However there is the ZoomFloppy, which is an implementation of the XUM1541 interface and it comes with an optional IEE488 plug! We can attach the 8050 to that, and use the OpenCBM tools to read and write data to and from the floppies.