Ok, I got a Zorba from my grandpa, Its have trouble booting cp/m of the supplied floppies, I want to get a copy of cp/m on to a new floppy disk. I have an old 5 1/4 inch floppy drive, but windows xp is having trouble reading disks. do i need special drivers, or is the drive dead?
Does the BIOS and Win Device Manager recognise the drive? Should work no problem in XP. It's worth cleaning the drive head, if you can still get hold of the cleaning disks. I threw mine out not a month ago.
Device manager shows genetic floppy drive installed, windows xp sees the drive but i cant read disk. note most of the 5 1/4'' floppies i have are cp/m 360 kb, but i do have some that should be dos formated.
I don't think XP uses the BIOS information for floppies, but just in case, is the BIOS set up correctly for the 5.25 drive? Might there be something under the driver tab to select the type? It may be possible that it just isn't supported, but I have never tried a 5.25 drive under XP.
I've come across at least one 5 1/4" & 3 1/2" where the heads had seemed to have gone out of alignment. They wouldn't read or write to disks properly or even not at all, but if i formatted a disk with the suspected out of alignment fdd, then the freshly formatted disk would read & write fine. Replacing the drive with an old spare solved the problem. The only thing i probably ever did with a fdd on XP was copy the latest bios version onto for the bios to install on reboot, but XP read & wrote to those fdd disks fine using the standard inbuilt xp drivers.
Have you looked around the internets? Both Zorba and Z80 CP/M have support sites, you may be able to download the system files and ignore the 5¼" drive.
Ok, I have the bios set to the rigth type of floppy disk. is there a way to realign the drive? I got the zorba to read disks(wasnt closing the drive doors). I've gone to the both websites the problem is that time has taking its toll on a lot of the disks. both websites are useless if i cant get the drive to work so i can write the cp/m to the floppy drive. Zorba's use 5 1/4 inch floppies for the operations system.
As far as I know, Windows doesn't have the capability to recognize CP/M formatted disks. (Linux does have the utilities for this). You may still be able to copy them using a raw imaging program (dosimage was a popular commandline utility). Keep in mind if the floppies are fairly old, they may have just gotten corrupted over the years. Magnetic media can only hold on to their data for so long. You may want to look for a set of CP/M floppy disk images on the net and copy them to known-good (360K) 5.25 disks.
Hmm, the only other thing I can think of (aside from a damaged drive) is if the drive itself is actually a 360K-only unit. If this is the case, setting the BIOS to 1.2MB (typically the only 5.25 option nowadays) won't work. At any rate, you may want to find another floppy drive, just in case
Ahhhh fair enough - If it was UK I'd happily post you one of mine across - got a few 5.25 drives kicking about.
