As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the Epson TF-20 5.25 inch floppy drive requires its OS to be loaded from disk before the unit will communicate and work with the PX-8.

My over riding intention since acquiring the TF-20 has been to back up the single boot disk that came with the system given that it’s over 20 years old and should the disk have failed the drive would have been rendered useless.

My initial attempts failed, although I have a copy of Copydisk and it was apparently successfully formatting and creating disks with the system tracks, when I tried to boot the drive with those disks, no luck.

I spoke to F J Kraan who advised that the proper disk type was Double Density (DD) as opposed to the High Density (HD) that I was using.  I tracked down some DD disks and repeated the process and it works.  I have of course therefore made several back up boot disks and feel somewhat relieved.

Incidentally the HD disks give the impression of working for general file usage, but success is intermittent, with occasional bad sector errors.  Meanwhile the working PF-10 has decided to well, stop working, hopefully this last burst of activity wasn’t its last hurrah.

I’m waiting on some C size batteries to try in the drive to see if it’s a battery issue or not.  Meanwhile I took one of the PF-10’s apart and took some crumb trail pictures with my phone.

(Update:- I’ve installed the four new C size batteries in the PF-10, but still no joy, harumph!)