TEAC FD-55E 5.25 Drive Issue

[D “DT” T]

Hi Folks,

So completely ignoring all the previous good advice made on this forum regarding buying 5.25 drives from eBay, I bought a TEAC FD-55E not realising it was a single sided 180k drive - I believe after reading its not very common and therefore was discontinued back in the day.

It cant read 360k standard floppies (of which I have lots), so i'm stuck.

Does anybody have experience with these drives and managed to get it connected successfully to the IO controller? I can see it operate correctly (i think) within CP/M but because of the aforementioned read issue - It doesn't read a disk - But doesn seem to operate correctly.

Any advice would be most welcome before I bin off the drive

Thanks,

Darren

[w9gb]

eBay is Great Place to Sell to ill-informed buyers, looking for bargains.

It is also great place for well informed Buyers to Acquire from uninformed sellers.

TEAC FD-55 Series (PDF, 6 page Color brochure)

https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/TEAC/TEAC%20FD-55%20Series.pdf

TEAC FD-55 Series

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Teac_FD-55_series

TEAC FD-55F : Orphaning MS-DOS world

https://retrocmp.de/fdd/teac/fd55f.htm

Good Luck.

[w9gb]

TEAC FD-55 Floppy Drive Instruction Manual (PDF, 73 pages)

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/teac/10131159-00A_FD55_InstructionMan.pdf

[da...@hansels.net]

Hi Darren,

Good news is that if the drive works properly in CP/M then the drive works just fine, no need to bin it or get a new one!

Bad news is that you won't be able to read standard 360k floppy disks (I assume "standard" means MS-DOS formatted)

on the AltairDuino. The Altair/MITS disk format is completely different from the IBM/MS-DOS format, not compatible in 

any way.

Note that the drive itself really doesn't really matter much (although 360k disks are double-sided so you won't be able to

read them on a single-sided drive), it's more about the disk controller and the operating system. Controller and OS
were very much intermingled in those days. Theoretically it would (with much effort) be possible to re-program the

controller to read MS-DOS formatted disks but even then you'd have to modify CP/M to actually work with that format.

David

[D “DT” T]

Thanks for the updates chaps.

So whilst I believe the FDD is working fine and is jumpered correctly etc, when I put a 360k DD diskette in the drive, i get errors as per the screenshot when using AFORMAT.COM - I'm led to believe because AFORMAT expects the diskette to be pre-formatted as its a highlevel formatting prog. 

How do i get the diskette into a position where it can be formatted? I've tried using FORMAT.COM from disk01.dsk but that doesnt work.

Thanks :)

[David Williams]

According to that vogons link, the E variant is a double density, single sided, 80 track drive. So you might need a high density floppy to handle the narrow tracks. If you had gotten one of the G variants, you could probably use the 8 inch CP/M formats.