GD SF7 Floppy Disk Errors

pcmantinker · Post by **pcmantinker** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 3:28 pm

Hi,

I have tried seven different floppy drives on my Game Doctor SF7 and only one of them works. I can format floppies just fine on the SF7, but I can't save what's in the RAM to the disk becuase I get a Disk Error! message. I have a USB floppy drive on for my laptop and I'm using Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 x64. I had no problems formatting floppies on my laptop, but for some reason the disks aren't being read properly when I try to load them in my SF7's disk drive. Another option I could try is getting a really old laptop or desktop that has a floppy drive built-in to properly format the floppies. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

ugetab · Post by **ugetab** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 9:31 pm

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Try making a DOS 6.22 boot disk, delete the contents of the disk when it's done(as in the files, not with any additional formatting), then try it in the device again.

Can't guarantee it'll work, but it should rule out the overly-modern-technology potential.

Post by **Memblers** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 9:50 pm

One thing I've noticed on using floppy drives between multiple systems, is they seem to go out of alignment or something. On my Game Doctor I think I've went through at least 3 (salvaged) floppy drives, but the one in it now doesn't work either. At one point I also bought a new floppy drive for my pc, because of incompatibilities cropping up between the other drives I was using.

I also remember using some driver in DOS that let the PC access the 1.6MB (?) extended format the game doctor could do. Works nice when it actually works. Sorry it's not much help to state the obvious that floppies just suck. The only somewhat reliable floppy drive I had was an LS-120 Superdisk (it supported normal floppies as well).

pcmantinker · Post by **pcmantinker** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 12:05 pm

Ok, I tried making a DOS 6.22 boot disk and the SF7 seemed to see the disk as valid becuase it listed files when I went to try and rename the files on disk. However, it only listed files when I went to try and Rename files and nothing else. I sometimes get a loop of "Insert Disk Please", "Reading...", "Disk Error!", and eventually it just stops trying to read the disk. I am thinking that it might be a floppy drive problem still so I ordered a brand new 3.5" floppy drive from Newegg. If I am still getting the same problems with the new drive, I guess this unit is shot for floppy disks.

There's also the parallel port method, but my laptop does not have a parallel port. Has anyone tried a USB to DB25 cable with the GD SF7? I've heard reports that it doesn't work, but I'm not 100% sure how it works on the PC end. Does it create a virtual parallel port through the USB port? If so, that might be a good option. I could also build an external CD ROM drive similar to the CD7. The CD7 seems like it would be the best option considering I don't have a parallel port on my laptop.

Near · Post by **Near** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 2:22 pm

Most of those parallel to USB cables are exclusively for printers. In fact if you take the casing off, you'll see that only nine of the pins are even wired, effectively making it more like serial to USB. Apparently older printers and modems only used nine pins.

pcmantinker · Post by **pcmantinker** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 9:13 pm

Ah, ok. That makes sense. I am setting up an old Pentium III desktop with a floppy drive and Windows 2000 SP4. I will see if disks formatted from that disk drive will read in the SF7 once my new drive for the SF7 arrives. Also, I can use a real parallel port with the old desktop. I just need to get a male to male parallel cable to transfer to and from the SF7.

pcmantinker · Post by **pcmantinker** » Tue Aug 04, 2009 12:50 pm

Ok, so after testing all of my drives in my Pentium III desktop, I decided to try one of them in my SF7 again and it worked! Now the disks format, load and write games. I am not sure what happened to fix the problem, but now floppy disk support works 100%!

Vorde · Post by **Vorde** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 1:22 pm

Hey I don't mean to revive a dead thread, but this is what seems to be happening with me. Inside of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and Windows XP x86 SP3 the floppy disk comes up okay, but when I put it into my GD7 it comes up and says Disk Error.
Now this is the stock drive that's inside of it.
Does it have a molex connector and a ATA 66 cable inside of it?
If I could just replace it inside that would work just fine probably.
Going to get Parallel cables set up, but I would like to get floppies working on it just for the novelty of it

pcmantinker · Post by **pcmantinker** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 1:33 pm

This thread is really old! Haha over two years old in fact. I would recommend just seeing if you can get some cheap floppy drives from eBay or something and also, make sure that you're using the external power supply with your SF7. Another thing to try is getting an old laptop with a floppy drive built in and a parallel port. Make sure that you install Windows 98 on the laptop as floppies of size 1.68MB can be read from and written to in Windows 98 with WinImage. For some reason, Windows NT based operating systems can't handle 1.68MB floppies very well from my experience. When I used my SF7, I wanted to be sure to fit as much on the disk as possible so I always formatted my disks at 1.68MB and could put 12Mbits on the disk instead of just 8Mbits with the standard 1.44MB format. I now use my SNES PowerPak for most old homebrew and SNES games. Hope this helps.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 3:51 pm

If the drive is able to read and write (test by backing up a cartridge and reloading it using a GOOD floppy disk) then the problem is the operating system writing the floppy. Windows 9X works better than NT, XP, Vista, Win7.

Another thing to consider is Floppy Drives need to be properly calibrated. If they are out of specification then you can have problems reading and writing data with 2 different floppy disk drives. One possibility is to use the same floppy drive in both the GDSF7 and in the PC, eliminating any problem from being out of spec. The worst possibility which does happen is assume spec is the middle, you could have one drive that's off spec to the left, and another off spec to the right. You could have alot of trouble reading a disk written in the other drive.

It is ofcourse possible to recalibrate floppy drives, but I have no idea what is involved and if you need particular special tools.

The GDSF7 works much better with a Parallel Port linked to an older PC running Windows 9X or possible Windows XP with the proper driver and software setup.

SkinnyV · Post by **SkinnyV** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 10:56 am

One cool thing you could do is replace the floppy with a floppy emulator. It's basicly a small PCB using a microcontroler that emulate a regular floppy drive read and write command and let you connect an SD card to it. It's supposed to work in anything that use standard floppy connector.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 11:13 am

They need modification to work with the GDSF7 for multiple disks due to the way the GDSF7 makes the emulators think the disk is still in use and therefore will not allow changing the virtual disk.

Plus it's still emulating a disk which is a pain. Do you really want to have 99 virtual floppies to page through?

SkinnyV · Post by **SkinnyV** » Sat Nov 12, 2011 3:08 pm

I am not aware of the issue you are mentionning but I would personnaly prefer this method over loading floppy. You don't have to put 99 floppy image on it, you can put a few at a time since connecting a sd card on your computer and transfer something is pretty fast and easy. I guess it's a matter of preference though.

Vorde · Post by **Vorde** » Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:40 am

Okay well I'm just going to skip using Floppy disks.
Trying to find a parallel cable in my town is almost impossible. People at Walmart and Canadian Tire looked at me like I was crazy

I'm going to visit an old computer store very soon to grab one of these cables because I think they would have one.
Any ideas on how to use Win XP with uCON64 and UserPort?
Do I just have to find out what the port number is for the parallel port, and then put it into the list?
Thanks for all your help guys

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Mon Nov 14, 2011 12:58 pm

You can buy a "straight thru" parallel port cable for not much money online. Places like Tototek.com sell them. I forget which driver i used for Windows XP. I think it came with UCON64. Be sure to know what parallel port modes your BIOS lets you set. Some may work with it and others may not.