🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <52048@coherent.coherent.com>, dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) says:

> [ lots of good stuff about the care and feeding of floppy disks ]
>
>7) Improper use of high-density floppies.  If you format a HD floppy in
>   an 800k drive, you may never be able to use it properly in a
>   Superdrive... it won't reformat in high-density mode properly, and
>   (even it it does) you may find it unreliable. (I'm told that this is
>   the case, but I haven't experienced it myself as I don't have a
>   Superdrive).
>
>I've seen all of these syndromes except for #7... but I've never seen any
>one of them at all frequently.

While I've never seen the particular behavior you describe here, I am
generally unimpressed by the behaviour of the FDHD drives.  One day, I tried
to format a stack of HD disks in an SE that had these drives.  Out of five
disks, I eventually got *one* of them to format, I think on the fourth try.

There seems to be a historical difficulty with Macintosh disk drives -- they
generally have a hard time formatting disks.  The student microcomputer lab
attendants here at Penn State have come up with a standard practice for
dealing with disks that fail to initialize (in old-style drives):  format
them in an IBM PS/2 first, then try again.  It works pretty well....

Am I deluded, or do the Macs have weaker magnetic fields when they write
to their disks than other computers?  It would certainly seem that way....

-------
Christopher Tate                   |
                                   | "Idle lawyers tend to become politicians,
cxt105@psuvm.psu.edu               |    so there is a certain social value
{...}!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!cxt105  |          in keeping them busy."
cxt105@psuvm.bitnet                |