🚀 go-pugleaf

  (This same article could be posted before. If so, sorry. We have had problems
on this system here, so that I'm not sure.)

In article <426@brazos.Rice.edu> rhode@ricevm1.rice.edu writes:
>720k is a standard (IBM-compat.) disk format, so I assume Atari was simply conforming to the industry standard.  For example, I was unable to get a PS/2
>to format a disk to 820k, but I format them to 720k all the time - for media
>transfer purposes.  The PS/2 won't read disks formatted by my Atari, but my
>Atari will read disks formatted by the PS/2.

  But this has nothing to do with the format of your disks but only with that
ATARI's GEM Desktop does not format the disks in 'real' MS-DOS/PS-2 compatible
format (the boot sector has not the 100% data format expected by MS-DOS).
  In TOS 1.4, as I know, this problem is solved. Finally.
  Media portability should not be a problem while using so-called 'fat' disks,
if your formatting program will set up consistant data structures representing
this disk (boot/configuration sector, SAT, root directory etc.) Other OS's
should be able to handle this if they are following their own guidelines.
  Definetely, a disk format bigger than 720k is not a non-standard disk format
at all. The only problem you could have with this is a decrease of reliability
and/or I/O performance. But this depends on 1) what media you're using (in my
experience, noname disks always are not that reliable) 2) what disk drive
you're using (maybe your disk drive spin frequency is too high so that you
can't write 11 sectors per track because then the 1st sector would be over-
written by the 11th. Of course, this problem would also appear while writing
to a 11sec disk coming from another machine bacause, while writing, TOS's
interest only focusses on what the configuration information of that disk is.
This could damage data. Besides, I would not recommend formatting disks with
more than 83 tracks on origional ATARI disk drives (SF354/SF314) because this
could cause the R/W heads to bounce against the slide boundaries. If this
happens frequently, this could dis-align or -even worse- severely damage your
drive.).
  Concluding, if you have important data to store on your disks, I would re-
commend to use data compression instead of fat disks.

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