The Sinclair QL Forum

Still struggeling with those dam. micro-things.

tried to format some i refelted , but " format failed " was the only message .

What is the problem ??

both mdv's generate the same message ,
is the microswitch the only inhibitor or are there other factors which might cause this problem ?

What felt did you use? How thick is the piece on the cart? Do you have a known good one that does format (to rule out the drives)? When you refelted and pulled the tape up out of the way, did it move freely?

Hi ,

i used the brown felt from the ebay supplier who is recommended on the forum .
Indeed i can rule out the mdv's as other cartridges do format.
yes, the tapes on these do move freely , the "dir " let's them run for a reasonable time .

so i was thinking of a non-engaged microswitch ........but is there more ?

techy wrote:but is there more ?

Yes, there's a lot more. Even the light pressure of a finger on the cartridge may make a real difference.

indeed those thing are freaking annoying , now i remember why i switched to real 3.5 " floppy's .

if time allows me i will get the whole setup out once more to see how that functioned .............


Thanks for replying !!

Cristian wrote:Yes, there's a lot more. Even the light pressure of a finger on the cartridge may make a real difference.

This was also one of "my tricks" at time, I didn't have any better than microdrives ;-) One of the rare users which used Metacomco C (Lattice) and Prospero Fortran with three microdrives each. At least C was: First MDV first compiler pass, Second MDV second compiler path, third MDV GST-Linker(!). And – Lattice C was too big (at least 1st pass) to fit in available memory (Toolkit II couldn't be used when compiling C with Lattice on 128 KB QL) – part of screen flickered, cause it was used as additional memory(!) – at this time I thought it was a bug of Metacomco C – NO(!) it was a great trick to run this excellent compiler (can – in opposite to C68 – create relocatable [reentrant] code) on an unexpanded QL.