Have been given an Apple ][ europlus for christmas with a Disk II drive and a BMOW Floppy Emu. The Floppy Emu is working fine but not owning any Apple Disk II floppys I'm unable to test the drive.
I have been using https://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/ to create images on the Emu but it fails to create disks using the Disk II drive.
I have some used double density disks, my question is can I use them and what software should I use to format them? Or what can else can I use to test the drive?
If you put a DOS 3.3 master disk on the Floppy Emu and boot from it, you can use it to initialize a disk in the Disk II drive.
If your Disk II is at port #2 of Slot 6, you would type
INIT HELLO,S6,D2
and wait for the disk to be prepared, which takes a few minutes. Then you can type
CATALOG
to see the new contents of the disk.
You won't be able to boot from port #2 of a disk controller, though. It always boots from port #1.
Double-density disks are correct; they can be either single- or double-sided. The Disk II is a single-sided drive: it only uses the bottom surface.
Thanks for the reply, good info I will try it, but I've found the fault, the head was filthy.
Seems to work well now, feeling very stupid should have tried cleaning earlier, bring on the roasting.