🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 14 Jun 1998 09:57:27 GMT, Elf_lord@usa.net (Paul Yang) said:

<much snipped>

> I've also found a few years ago that I could format a lower
>density floppy to the next one up and use it in my drive without a
>problem, ie ( a 720K to 1.44Mb) though no other drive I've seen has
>been able to read it if I did that, so I've used this feature as a
>security function, since files stored on those floppies can't be read
>by any other floppy drive. Though I've long since discovered
>encryption. Still I kind of like the fact that I can make floppies
>work for my drive only, the other drives wouldn't even recognise the
>floppy as being formatted.

That's almost surely because your drive doesn't use the HD sense feature
that almost all drives do.  The little knockout on the upper left
(looking at the front of the disk) is only present on real HD disks (the
hole just on the other corner as the write-protect hole).

There's usually a switch in your drive that is depressed when there is
no hole, and will stick through the hole if present, indicating an HD
disk is inserted.

Your "security" feature can be defeated by simply taking on of your
disks and doing what people used to do all the time to save
money...punch a hole in that corner.

I used to use my soldering iron with an old tip to just poke holes in
all my (cheaper) DD disks.

About 90% of the time, the "converted" disk worked fine.  5% of the time
they developed errors within a week or so, and the other 5% of the time,
it would find all sorts of errors during a format.

So it seems your drive assumes all disks are HD...I suppose to format a
DD disk, you'd have to use the "/f:720" parameter with format.  Hmm...