Catweasel IV Plus - ADF writing on disk works but errors on real Amiga

[Rakki]

I have very strange problem with my Catweasel IV Plus. I have written a lot of ADF images back to disks (over 40) but all of them contains errors. Verify on PC informs that all is ok (all the disks are free of errors when using verify).

On real Amiga X-Copy checkdisk informs me that disk contains almost only errors (error type 5 or 6). Only some of blocks are green but mostly red. Booting the disks works ok and most loads up flawlessly. On other hand all disks written with real amiga contains no errors when checking them

I have replaced PC disk drive but results are always same.

Settings on PC (Windows XP 32bit):
Catweasel driver version 2.6.0.0
Imagetool 3.2

Settings on Imagetool 3.2:
Disk: 3.5" Amiga Floppy
TPI: 96
RPM: 300

Disks:
Edit: Used REAL double density disks (new and old disks). So no HD disks in this case.

Tested with Amiga 600 and Amiga 500. Both disk drives works properly but X-Copy just informs of huge amount of errors for all disks written with Catweasel.

[thomas]

Are these real DD floppy disks or HD disks with the HD hole coverd with tape? HD disks might be unreliable when used in pure DD drives.

[jmmijo]

Originally Posted by thomas

Are these real DD floppy disks or HD disks with the HD hole coverd with tape? HD disks might be unreliable when used in pure DD drives.

Exactly what I was thinking too, verify you are using REAL double density diskettes, you will note that they do no have any density hole on the opposite side of the write-protect tab

[Rakki]

Originally Posted by jmmijo

Exactly what I was thinking too, verify you are using REAL double density diskettes, you will note that they do no have any density hole on the opposite side of the write-protect tab

Thanks, but all the disks are REAL double density diskettes.

[prowler]

If that were happening to me, I would suspect a misalignment of the heads between the floppy drive unit connected to my Catweasel card and the Amiga's floppy drive unit.

I've just seen that you've already tried changing the floppy drive unit attached to your Catweasel card, so you will have to change the Amiga's floppy drive unit. If you do not have a suitable replacement Amiga floppy drive, you could try an external floppy drive unit if you have one.

The fact that the disks boot properly shows that the head alignment of the drives is satisfactorily matched in the region of the boot sector.

Edit: Before trying this, have a go with this ImageTool.

[Rakki]

Originally Posted by prowler

Before trying this, have a go with this ImageTool.

Thanks, this helped a lot in this case. With old Imagetool Hotfix version disk writing works flawlessly and also X-copy shows only green (=checkdisk 100% ok). This stands for Imagetool 3.2 configuration error or some bug once again in Imagetool.

I'll continue investigation with Imagetool 3.2 configuration.

[Rakki]

More results:

I installed a brand new Teac FD-235HF-C929 that was originally meant for other Amiga projects (contains jumpers for setting RDY etc) and removed the cable connection between motherboard floppy connector and Catweasel. Drive is now installed as normal PC drive settings to Catweasel only.

After that numerous tests (about 30 - 40) only pain and problems. Tried to format disks with amiga and then write them with pc but still errors. Also Amiga drive was tested on PC but it didn't worked at all, it failed on writing all the time. Actually I had 2 successfully attemps today and I spent about 8 hours with this

Imagetool hotfix
It seems to write a bit better these disks but still experienced problems.

Disk checking with Superduper 3.13 succeeds but the same disk returns a load of errors with X-Copy 10. If it passes X-copy 10 check, it doesn't pass Superduper 3.13 diskcheck (1 - 2 errors / disk). This "hotfix version" has a very annoying limitation, it writes only disks exactly as 880kb, if the image size is different it returns buffer size error.

I already sent mail to Jens, hopefully he can give support with this issue.

[Schoenfeld]

Got the message and we solved the issue. Beta drivers have fixed Amiga write timing:

http://beta.icomp.de/

and for some reason, the Catweasel user manual is not linked from the Catweasel MK4plus product page, so here's the link again:

http://siliconsonic.de/t/catweasel-usermanual.pdf

Jens

[Rakki]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Got the message and we solved the issue. Beta drivers have fixed Amiga write timing:

Thanks Jens, this really solved the problem. Imagetool 3.30.176 seems to be very good for writing Amiga disks with the beta driver.

I've checked about 20 disks with Superduper 3.13 and X-Copy checkdisk functions and all disk checking tests passed.