Discs reading as 'not formatted'

Hello
I have a floppy drive problem on a Kinetic running 4.03. I recently got locked out of the machine and when I got it back my copy of Sibelius (the main reason I keep the RPC going) showed as corrupted. This is normally a simple matter of reinstalling from the Sibelius disc, but my disc drive first claimed that there were disc errors on both of the two Sibelius discs I own, and now says that neither of the discs is formatted. I’ve verified both of them on my RiscCube running VA, and they’re OK. The RPC floppy drive reads other discs – is there anything I can do to make it recognise the Sibelius discs?

While I’m here, a further problem! While I can run Sibelius on the RiscCube, it suffers from a bad screen flicker which gives you a migraine after 5 minutes. This is to do with screen cacheing, a problem which was solved many years ago by a programme called SibAid written by David Coronel of the Data Store. But I can’t get it to work on VA. What could be the reason for this?

The RPC floppy drive reads other discs – is there anything I can do to make it recognise the Sibelius discs?

First make clone of the dics in question. APDL (with David Holden at the helm) had a set of PD, Freeware and Shareware utilities on the APDL web site. One of those (was shareware, much became freeware so that may be too, either way it isn’t much outlay)

Then work on the cloned disc

Thanks – I’ve got !ProCopy from APDL, and now have a disc image of my Sibelius install disc. But I’ve tried to copy it 6 or 7 times with different unformatted discs and each time it’s failed at the Verify stage. When I’ve tried using !ProCopy to preformat the discs to 800K every disc I’ve tried shows defects. Discs that are perfectly usable as they are show defects as soon as I try to reformat them on both the RiscCube and the RPC, either using !ProCopy or formatting via the drive. The RPC still shows the Sibelius discs as unformatted; but the RiscCube has suddenly started saying that every floppy I own, including the previously stable Sibelius discs, has Disc Error 10 at :0/00000000. What’s going on?

Panic over. I copied the disc image to the RPC and found a disc that it would read, so Sibelius is now reinstalled. What I do with the RiscCube floppy drive is another matter…

For anyone who wants to copy their original Sibelius discs !ProCopy is a life saver.

For anyone who wants to copy their original Sibelius discs !ProCopy is a life saver.

My general advice would be: For anyone with a copy of any software on a “protected” disc – use something like ProCopy and use the copy rather than the original.

ProCopy was the name I couldn’t remember, just remembered where I saw it.

While I can run Sibelius on the RiscCube, it suffers from a bad screen flicker which gives you a migraine after 5 minutes. This is to do with screen cacheing, a problem which was solved many years ago by a programme called SibAid written by David Coronel of the Data Store. But I can’t get it to work on VA. What could be the reason for this?

Any ideas for this one?!

Any ideas for this one?!

I was going to suggest querying on the VA list, but you’ve done that. Queying with DataStore is probably a lost cause as they seem to be PC only these days. The old web site with the SibAid download on it disappeared around 2008/09 (but wayback has it cached)

The basis was turning off screen caching when the four colour(and for four colour) mode used for editing is entered. Possibly a change in the installed OS with regard to screen caching?

The basis was turning off screen caching when the four colour(and for four colour) mode used for editing is entered. Possibly a change in the installed OS with regard to screen caching?

Hmmm, from the discussion on iconbar it looks like it never worked on any version of RO4.x¹

I presume a small module that does what SibAid tries to do via OS_ScreenMode4 would do the trick – i.e detect the change to a 4 colour screen mode and switch off screen cache, then switch it back on when the system exits the 4 colour mode

¹ Unsurprising as Sibelius was written for RO3.x

Hmmm, from the discussion on iconbar it looks like it never worked on any version of RO4.×1

I haven’t checked that out yet; but SibAid was written specifically for RO4 (the flickering was never a problem with RO3) and works for me on 4.03