Insight 1 and ETCedit

Hi Aaron,

I am going to start with the obvious, are you using DSDD floppies?  The Insight 1 uses DSDD floppies.  If you are trying to use DSHD floppies, they may work if you tape over the hole on the side of the disk.  DSDD floppies are hard to come by these days.  I purchased a box about 4 years ago, when I found some just to have them in case I ran into an old desk.

Now, the problems that I have experienced in the past were when the floppies were either formatted on the computer or fresh out of the box as formatted disks.  What I have found to work is to format the floppy on the light board and then use the disk with ETCEdit to save the file onto it.  Remember that there can only be one file on the floppy, and it doesn't want to have any system files saved on it.

Hope that helps,

John

Hi John.

Thanks for the response.

I have been using the Double Density disks. They work fine in the board and then when I try them on my computer, no luck.

I've also tried formatting them on the board as well and that hasn't worked either.

Aaron, it's even more complicated than taping over the extra hole in a newer diskette. It's also highly desirable to use a diskette that has never been in any computer other than the Insight 1, particularly Apple machines. It's also possible that the diskette drive in your PC (especially if it's a recent model) isn't fully backward-compatible with the old track layout of 720KB diskettes. Does the PC sometimes manage to read or write a show?

Not to give more detail than you want, this is about not only having twice as many tracks on a 1.44MB diskette, it's also about the virtual certainty that the head and access arm alignment cannot be precisely identical between two different diskette drives. This means that it's actually more conservative (I mean, safer - - - ) to have one diskette JUST for moving shows between the Insight and the PC, and then, after loading an offline-edited show, put a "light-booth ONLY" diskette right into the Insight and SAVE the show again.

I hasten to add that this is not a reflection on either your PC manufacturer or the quality of the Insight, which is a perfectly fine, older board. It's just that diskette technology has moved on. You could think of it as like trying to use a binder from a Staples in the US on a bundle of A4 paper that the designer sent you from abroad!

I have never done this myself, but if you are really short of diskettes, it might be worth using a bulk audiotape eraser on the diskette-heavily, on both sides, and then formatting it as "new" in the Insight. But this is a last-resort.