In article <1992Sep17.033436.12553@sifon.cc.mcgill.ca>, duperval@IRO.UMontreal.CA (Laurent Duperval) writes...
quoted text
>In article <1992Sep16.163436.12910@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu> sjmadsen@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Steve Madsen) writes:
>>
>>        Greetings..  I'm having some problems getting rawrite to correctly
>>write my rootimage to a 1.2Mb drive.  The disk has been formatted, rawrite
>>correctly reports 15 sectors/track, however I don't see it writing more than 13
>>or 14 at the most.  I end up getting an "address mark not found" when rawrite
>>tries to write to track 80, so I'm thinking that something is wrong.  The
>>rawrite version is 1.2.
>>
>>        Before I start modifying rawrite.c and recompiling it, can anyone tell
>>me if I'm doing something wrong?  I didn't notice anything in the FAQ file
>>about this, so I thought I'd try a post.  If you can help, please email me; I
>>don't read this group often.
>>
> 
>Too bad, you really should.  I'm posting because I think that this
>information may be useful for other people as well.
> 
>I had the same behavior under rawrite and rawrite2.  I never understood
>what the problem was.  So disks were written to properly but others
>didn't get the program to register 15 sectors/track.
> 
>I ran it under DR-DOS 6.0 if that's any help to anyone.  The only way I
>could fix it was to go in the routine that returns the number of
>sectors/track and force it to return 15 for Drive A.  I haven't tried it
>with 3.5" drives so I can't say anything about them.
>-- 
>Laurent Duperval          | The opinions expressed herein are my own and
>duperval@samson.crim.ca   | do not represent those of the company I work
>Tel: 340-5798             | for.  That's because they don't have enough 
>                                                 | $$$ to afford them.  Noone does.

I too have noticed these problems on some PCs, and it looks like possible BIOS
problems with being able to read the first sector on the disk, as rawrite1.2 
tries to read the first sector three times to figure out the format.

I have released a modification to rawrite, rawio1.3, which supports both
reading and writing floppies, as well as passing in parameters on the command
line, so you can handle 720K 3.5", etc, or only read or write a portion of 
the disk.

Since there was one silly error (48 tracks for for a 1.2M 5.25"), I have made
a new version, 1.4, which also fixes another silly error, and will post it in
a couple of days when I have had a chance to test it more. 

Both source, and uuencode .exe!

Regards
Richard Sharpe