Hard Sector Diskettes, was Re: Northstar Horizon

[jim stephens]

Marvin Johnston wrote:

>A couple of questions pop up on this Northstar diskette discussion. First, was
>the oersted rating the same for all of the N* Horizon (and Advantage?)
>diskettes? A
>
I never had but a single type of floppy media for the single and double 
density Northstar controllers.
I was lucky to have almost all Verbatim 10 sector disks and they worked 
fine.

Unfortunately a lot of my 10 sector disks have apple stuff on them, as 
at one time there
was a time you could get the hard sector diskettes a log cheaper than 
the better soft
sector ones, and they worked fine.  I don't have a working apple 2 with 
a cpm card
to try to copy over to soft sector disks.  Only thing I'd really keep is 
the bios source
anyway.

As to using 10 sector 8" diskettes, why?  I put both a northstar and a 
tarbell in the
same box, which was a northstar.  I could boot from either controller 
depending on
which format I wanted to be the "A" drive, and modified the bios to have the
read / write code for both diskettes. 

No need for any unusual work on the diskettes. 5 1/4" diskettes were all 
northstar
cpm, and the 8" ones were standard IBM ones read and written by the tarbell
controller.

Jim