After a bit of asking around, and with subsequent upload assistance from @fogWraith and GuiBer (on the Garden), I'm pleased to announce we now have functional copies of the floppy drive diagnostic utility, DriveTech on Macintosh Garden:
Functionality was a bit challenging to figure out, but after a bit of experimentation, I was able to determine how the two included disk images can be written to a real floppy and how they are used with DriveTech. I rewrote the text description to make the process as clear as possible.
All said, the software will help diagnose bad or questionable 800K or 1.44MB floppy drives. It shows you the exact Track and Sector (and which head too), when a failure occurs. It's a pretty neat utility. Still not sure why Micromat didn't allow testing of 800K GCR functionality when using a 1.44MB drive, but it is what it is.
With that said, I would still advise doing a full disk format (Initialization) in the Finder, as well as file copies to/from your floppy disk, to confirm the media is working well.
Enjoy!
Functionality was a bit challenging to figure out, but after a bit of experimentation, I was able to determine how the two included disk images can be written to a real floppy and how they are used with DriveTech. I rewrote the text description to make the process as clear as possible.
All said, the software will help diagnose bad or questionable 800K or 1.44MB floppy drives. It shows you the exact Track and Sector (and which head too), when a failure occurs. It's a pretty neat utility. Still not sure why Micromat didn't allow testing of 800K GCR functionality when using a 1.44MB drive, but it is what it is.
With that said, I would still advise doing a full disk format (Initialization) in the Finder, as well as file copies to/from your floppy disk, to confirm the media is working well.
Enjoy!
